Downtown fire leaves 1 dead EVERETT - A three-alarm fire broke out at an apartment building downtown that left one person dead last week.
Multiple fire departments responded to the fire around 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8 at the 118-year-old McCrossen Building on the southwest corner of Hewitt and Oakes avenues.
More than a dozen people lived in the 13-unit building. Residents told firefighters that one man was unaccounted for and that the man lived in the apartment where the fire appears to have started, Everett Fire Marshal Rick Robinson said. Firefighters were unable to search the building in the early stages due to the fire’s rapid growth.
Everett Police Department spokesman Aaron Snell could not confirm as of last week if the body was the unaccounted resident.
Residents in nearby apartments were evacuated to escape the smoke. The American Red Cross of Snohomish County assisted most of those people.
Bernice Ras, who lives in the Commerce Building at Hewitt and Rockefeller avenues, saw power lines “sparking and popping” from the fire.
“It was something to see those flames,” Ras said.
Donna, a Commerce Building resident who declined to give her last name, said the fire was intense as people exited the 48-unit building.
The building that caught fire was built in the 1890s and was once the home of Jack’s Men’s Shop. It was heavily renovated around 2000, said David, a former tenant who worked on the renovations but declined to give his last name.
He knew a resident living there who got out “with just the clothes he was wearing,” David said.
Power was cut off for about five nearby city blocks to prevent energized power lines from possibly falling around the fire scene.
The fire was knocked down at about 3:30 a.m.
The building housed antique shop The Spare Room and Hat Trick Pizza at street level.
