Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007

Survivor thought friends were already outside

Fallon Sposato awoke to a blaring alarm and smoke seeping into the bedroom of the beach house where she and 12 friends had been partying just hours earlier.

Her lungs and eyes were burning. The inside of the house glowed orange as she ran down a staircase near her first-floor room.

Sposato was sure, as flames engulfed the Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., house behind her, that her friends were already outside.

“And then nobody else was out yet,” the 19-year-old USC sophomore recalled during an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Seven college students died Sunday morning in the fire at the beach house — six from USC, and a seventh from Clemson University. Six others made it outside, into the arms of neighbors and rescue workers.

“We were all hysterical. They were holding us back, trying to get our friends,” said Sposato, a native of Orlando, Fla.

Many of the 13 students staying at the house were members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and Delta Delta Delta sorority, and some had attended high school in Greenville together.

Students were drinking alcohol at the house, but Sposato said no illegal drugs were ever present. “We were just hanging out and listening to music.”

To anyone who’s written off the fire as a result of careless underage drinking and youthful irresponsibility, Sposato said that simply isn’t the case.

“These are the most responsible of all of my friends,” she said. “This group was a solid group, and that’s why it’s just so unreal that this would happen.”

It’s against N.C. and S.C. law for anyone under age 21 to buy, possess or drink alcohol. Everyone in the house was under age 21.

Sposato, a Tri-Delta, said she and Allison Walden of Ohio, her roommate and sorority sister, joined the weekend getaway after scrubbing a trip to Ohio State. They picked the location closer to home, Sposato said, so they could be back on campus for sorority initiation activities late Sunday afternoon.

“Everybody just kind of needed a break from Columbia,” Sposato said.

The students caravanned up to the resort town after classes Friday, she said, listening to music and swimming in a canal behind the house, which was on stilts. On Saturday, the group went out to lunch and watched the University of Georgia-University of Florida game before grilling food on a patio under the house and getting ready to watch the USC Gamecocks take on the Tennessee Volunteers.

“We just had a good time.”

The group caroused into the early morning hours, drinking and hanging out on the home’s back deck. Sposato said she was the first to go to bed, turning in at 4:30 a.m. just after calling her father to report she’d lost her camera.

Several hours later, Sposato and her boyfriend awoke to the alarms, flames and smoke. Called by neighbors who saw the flames, emergency personnel were pulling up when she got out of the house, Sposato said. Several hours later, she would learn her roommate was among the dead.

Another student who made it out of the burning house told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday he made the decision to jump into the canal to escape his smoke-filled third-floor room.

“You knew you had to jump at some point — that was the only option,” Tripp Wylie, 20, said on the show.

Debbie Smith, mayor of the resort community, has said investigators believe the fire was likely accidental and started in the rear of the house, either on or near a deck facing a canal. That side of the home appeared to be the most heavily damaged. Most of the victims were found in the home’s five bedrooms.

For now, Sposato said, all she and the five other survivors can do is tell the story of the friends they lost.

“It’s just very unreal. It’s going to be hard for the six of us, because we lost seven of our closest friends,” she said, holding back tears. “But I guess we just have to keep going, and I think that’s the hardest part.”

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