It had been planned as a fun weekend

By Jessica Rocha - McClatchy Newspapers

It had been just a fun beach weekend for the college students, filled with football, cookouts, new friends and late nights.

Now seven students are dead, victims of a Sunday morning fire at Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., that quickly engulfed a two-story beach house and allowed just six to escape with their lives. The State Bureau of Investigation was still investigating the cause late Sunday.

Some of the vicims are from Greenville, an Ocean Isle Beach Town Council member told The Greenville News.

While the University of South Carolina was awaiting official confirmation, six of the dead were believed to be from USC, the other from Clemson University.

And Dennis Pruitt, USC’s director of student affairs, said late Sunday afternoon the fire appears to have affected two USC Greek organizations - Delta Delta Delta sorority and Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, about 50 members of the Alpha Phi Omega co-ed service fraternity mourned their South Carolina friends’ loss.

The Chapel Hill group met the South Carolina students this weekend, renting two homes next door to the group of 13, in order to hold a traditional pledge weekend.

The two groups bonded: watching football, grilling out, and joking about the old Carolina rivalry.

"It's strange to form a friendship, and now we are all going to try to figure out some way to cope," said Rebecca Wood, president of the UNC-Chapel Hill Alpha Phi Omega Rho chapter.

"We are thinking about their families and the kids that are going to have to cope with this for the rest of their lives," she said.

UNC sophomore Alex Koonce said members of the S.C. group were among some of the nicest people he’d met in a while. They joked about their Carolina rivalry and how both schools had lost their college football games that day.

They even had some common college acquaintances, and Koonce expected to keep in touch.

"I definitely planned on contacting them on Facebook," he said. "If I ever had an opportunity to go down to South Carolina, I definitely would have looked them up."

Koonce stayed over at the Gamecocks’ house dancing, talking, listening to music.

Some of the group had started smoking cigarettes inside, he said.

Koonce had thought about crashing on a couch there, but around 4:30 a.m. he chose to walk next door to the house the UNC students rented.

A couple of hours later, he was shaken awake by news of the fire.

"It’s shocking, really," Koonce said. "Just to meet some people and hang out with them all night.

"Then the next morning they are gone."

Rick Wylie, a Greenville parent who said his son was the student who jumped from the house, said some of the people in the house had been friends since attending high school together in Greenville, the Associated Press reported.

He said he had spoken with son Trip Wylie, a business major, twice during the day and that his son was "scuffed up a bit" from the jump, but on his way home Sunday night.

"He's in shock," Wylie said. "It's just an incomprehensible thing for these parents."