New friendships cut short by fire

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 fire, which erupted before 7 a.m., left the house a charred, roofless skeleton.

“There was no part of the house that was not covered with flames,” said Stephanie Wilkins, a UNC-Chapel Hill junior staying with a group at the house next door. “It was ... just completely covered and engulfed in flames.”

Officials had not released the victims’ names Sunday night. Six of the dead were from the University of South Carolina, the seventh from Clemson University, according to one USC official. The six who survived also were from USC.

Members of the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity from Chapel Hill met the South Carolina students this weekend, renting two homes next door to the group of 13 to hold a 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.

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 football games that day.

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

“If I ever had an opportunity to go down to South Carolina,” he said, “I definitely would have looked them up.”

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

He 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.

About 7 a.m., Wilkins and Wood were awakened by yells and knocking after some students noticed the intense glow of the burning Scotland Street house.

“I was still in bed,” said Wilkins, a junior. “I thought it was raining outside.”

A friend opened a door.

“And right as he opened the door, ash and smoke and embers started pouring in,” Wilkins said. “The fire alarms went off in our house.”

Wood said: “You could feel the heat. The embers were flowing onto our porches.”

Firefighters arrived within four minutes of receiving calls and got the fire under control in 30 minutes.

Koonce and other members of the Chapel Hill group were shocked by the events.

“Just to meet some people and hang out with them all night.

“Then the next morning,” he added, “they are gone.”