LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. – There are still many questions from anxious neighbors of a northern Virginia woman who was killed in a terrible fire late last week at a home in Sterling.
The fire broke out in Riptide Square in the Lowe’s Island neighborhood of Sterling, not far from Trump National Golf Course.
What we know:
The Loudoun County Fire Marshals and Sheriff’s Offices are working together on this investigation. They’re still trying to determine the cause of the deadly fire, and they have yet to identify the victim.
A neighbor shared video and several photos of the fire with FOX 5.
It happened around 1 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 24. Several neighbors said they could hear a woman screaming for help from the third floor of her burning home. She was trapped and did not make it out alive.
They say she was a young woman who just moved into the neighborhood this summer.
What they’re saying:
The blaze broke out just after 1 a.m. in the 20000 block of Riptide Square. When crews arrived, two homes were fully engulfed in flames and a third had been damaged. Firefighters brought the fire under control within an hour.
Eight residents were displaced and are receiving assistance from the American Red Cross.
The people who live in the area are still reeling from what happened.
“I woke up and it’s like, ‘oh my God,’ the homes are gone,” one neighbor told FOX 5.
“Just a total tragedy. You don’t expect it to happen in your own neighborhood and you know, just the fact that there was a loss of life really…tragedy,” another neighbor said.
“Hopefully, they’ll discover what the cause was and just a tragedy that it spread so fast to these other units. It brings concern to myself — what if something happened in a unit next to me?” said another neighbor, who spoke with FOX 5.
Dig deeper:
Other people living in the neighborhood tell FOX 5 that the townhomes were built in the late 1990s.
Loudoun County Fire EMS and the Sheriff’s Office investigators have been at the scene all day. We’re told the gas had been turned off for a couple of days but that service has now been restored to the nearby townhomes.
In all, three homes and eight people have been displaced by the fire. Nobody else was seriously hurt.
