Fond memories survive flames

OCEAN ISLE BEACH, N.C. — Emily Yelton was flattered to be invited for a weekend at the beach with a group of sorority girls and their boyfriends from Columbia.

Emily and her twin sister, Meredith, 19-year-old sophomores at Clemson University, had planned to spend last weekend at home in Simpsonville.

But that changed Thursday, when Emily got a call from her boyfriend in Columbia, Travis Cale.

“She was excited,” said Jeff Yelton, recalling his daughter’s decision to accept the invitation to Ocean Isle Beach, N.C. “She was sort of the outsider, and now they were inviting her to go with them.”

Over the past week, details have emerged about how 13 college students from South Carolina — 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds, most members of Delta Delta Delta sorority and Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity — came together last weekend in a quiet beach town just across the North Carolina border.

Before daybreak last Sunday, the three-story house where they stayed would become a fiery death trap for seven of them. Emily and Travis, dating since high school in Greenville, were among those who didn’t get out.

A blaze roared through the vacation home, reducing it to a charred frame within 30 minutes. Authorities said Friday they don’t know yet what sparked the flames but say they can’t rule out careless smoking.

Two jumped to safety from second- and third-story windows. Those who perished probably never woke up.

The students had stayed up most of the night watching football, partying, dancing and hanging out on the deck with students from UNC-Chapel Hill who had joined them from nearby beach houses, according to two of the survivors.

“The lights were on all night,” Ocean Isle Beach neighbor Jeff Newsome said. “They were having a good time.”

CLOSE TIES

The group’s plans took shape the week of Oct. 22, when Cassidy Pendley mentioned to Tripp Wylie that one of her sorority sisters had a beach house they were thinking of using for the weekend.

Did he want to go?

Sure, Tripp said.

He invited his buddy Justin Anderson. Word spread, guys checked with girlfriends and, by Friday, they were on the road.

The beach house, Changing Channels, was owned by the Hartsville family of Delta Delta Delta pledge Katherine Auman.

Everyone in the group, with one exception, knew each other through childhood connections and Greek life.

There were Tripp and Cassidy, Travis and Emily, Justin and Lauren Mahon.

Brothers Will and Andrew Rhea were joined by Katherine and her Tri-Delt big sister, Allison “Allie” Walden.

Fallon Sposato and Ray Charles, USC students from Florida, came along, too.

Ashley Perdue, a friend of Katherine’s from Florence who didn’t know many in the group, made 13.

Five were freshmen, just two months into their first year away from home. Eight were sophomores.

Travis, Justin and Tripp had known each other since they were boys growing up together in the Greenville suburbs.

They had nicknames, theme songs and inside jokes involving Mario Kart, a video go-kart racing game popular when most in the group were children.

At Greenville’s J.L. Mann High School and Buncombe Street United Methodist Church, their circle grew to include Emily and Meredith, tall, striking twin sisters who did everything together — including enroll at Clemson.

After high school, Travis and Justin headed off to USC. Tripp’s parents made him go to USC-Lancaster “to get my head on straight.” This fall, as a sophomore, Tripp was allowed to join his friends.

In this year’s SAE pledge class of about 20, Tripp met Will from Florence, a high-volt personality and perfect fit with the Upstate guys.

On the first day of classes, Tripp walked into dance appreciation class and announced he needed somebody to sit with. The class of several hundred students laughed, and he ended up beside Cassidy, a Tri-Delt pledge from Charleston.

Cassidy was a former cheerleader with a perfect smile. Tripp walked her to her dorm after class, and the two exchanged cell-phone numbers.

Others in Tripp’s group, too, would find themselves attracted to girls from Delta Delta Delta.

The group developed nicknames for one another. Some were obvious: Tripp was T-rip or Tripper. Justin was J-dog. Travis was T-rav. Will was Ray-ray. Emily, simply Em.

Some nicknames had a back story.

At the SAE fraternity house, Mario Kart was king. Everybody played it in Travis and Justin’s room. Justin was the undisputed champ, proudly claiming the plastic championship wrestling belt that the friends had passed around for years.

Justin always raced as Princess Peach, and his fraternity brothers never let him hear the end of it. Because he was dating Lauren, they joked he chose the princess because it reminded him of her.

Soon, they let Lauren in on the joke. She became Princess Peach.

‘NOTHING WAS WILD’

When USC plays an away game, many students take a break from school.

Last weekend, the weather was still warm — a perfect excuse for a beach getaway.

Roommates Fallon and Allie had considered going to Ohio State for the weekend but settled on Ocean Isle Beach so they could be back on campus for sorority initiation late Sunday.

At 2 p.m. that Friday, Tripp, Cassidy, Ashley and Katherine left campus in Katherine’s red Nissan Xterra for the 3½-hour drive.

“It was really a last-second thing,” Tripp said.

Their three-car caravan was the first to arrive Friday afternoon at 1 Scotland St.

A fourth car, carrying the Rhea brothers and Allie, showed up about an hour later.

Bob and Thelma Alexander, who live next door to the Auman house, noticed as the group started arriving at 4:30 or 5 p.m. They didn’t do much to attract attention, hanging out on the deck and in the great room.

“They were just typical college kids,” said Bob Alexander, who is accustomed to weekend visitors to Ocean Isle Beach. “No unusual rowdiness.”

The group went to a grocery store and swam in the canal. They ordered two or three carryout pizzas for dinner.

Someone showed up with a chocolate cake to celebrate Ashley’s birthday. After singing “Happy Birthday,” the boys smeared cake in each others’ faces.

A hip-hop, reggae song, “Me Love,” by Sean Kingston, became the theme song of the trip, part of a spontaneous weekend soundtrack. “It was on a CD that we had that we played nonstop,” Tripp said.

Saturday morning, he came out to the porch to find everyone wearing something related to Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Most of it had been raided from his stuff, the result of a recent trip to Talladega Superspeedway, where they watched the race from the pits.

“That will probably be one of my best memories, right there,” he said.

Saturday brought more swimming in the canal, a few trips to the beach and some pickup football games.

The afternoon was overcast. The wind was calm and the beach littered with seashells about 2:30 p.m. when Michael Winburn took his dog, Abby, for a walk.

He let his terrier off her leash and she headed straight for a group of six or eight college students, all but one of them girls.

“They were all just playing, looking at shells — just enjoying each other,” said Winburn, from Bennettsville.

The young people seemed wholesome and engaging; Winburn thought they might be part of a church group.

They were all wearing Gamecock T-shirts except for a blonde in a bright orange Clemson one, who joked it was the shirt she usually wore to clean house.

“They were pretty,” Winburn said. “Goodness gracious, they were all so pretty, and the bright smiles.”

The afternoon was devoted to college football: Florida vs. Georgia at 3 p.m. followed by USC at Tennessee at 7:45 p.m.

The Alexanders heard the group yelling across a canal at a group of University of North Carolina students who’d rented two houses nearby. UNC was losing to Wake Forest, and the banter was mostly about football. “They were hollering and laughing back and forth,” Bob Alexander said.

During the USC game, the group grilled hamburgers and sausages.

Tripp, Justin and Travis talked about how Blake Mitchell needed to play quarterback instead of Chris Smelley.

The game was intense. Down 21-0, Tripp said some in the group were getting disgusted, but “we forced everybody to watch it, just because there is always a chance.”

About 9:30 p.m., Emily called home. She told her Dad that everybody else was downstairs watching the game. Not much of a football fan herself, and a Clemson student at that, she’d holed up in her bedroom to watch TV.

“She was telling me a story about a 75-year-old man from Chapel Hill who was fishing. He had let her cast the rod and fish some,” Yelton recalled.

“She wanted to tell me what a great time they were having down there.”

The USC game lasted after midnight, with a last-minute loss by Carolina. The disappointed students spread out and relaxed.

Three or four of the UNC students came over to join them.

Tripp acknowledged there was drinking going on but said he didn’t know who brought the alcohol. The people who smoked cigarettes did so outside.

“There was never anything out of control,” he said. “Nothing was wild.”

After the game, Tripp pulled out a DVD of “The Last Waltz,” a 1976 concert documentary about The Band.

Everyone stayed up late. Fallon said she was the first to go to bed at 4:30 a.m.

“I saw no one drinking on the deck,” Bob Alexander recalled later. “There was music, but it wasn’t excessively loud. It didn’t bother us. ... Kids just having fun.”

As the Alexanders looked out their picture window, the last thing they saw before turning in about 11 p.m. was a lone couple, slow-dancing on the deck.

AN INFERNO

Newspaper carrier Tim Burns was coming over the causeway from the mainland just before 7 a.m. when he saw a red glow to the north.

“It was a huge plume of smoke,” he said.

He turned his car toward Scotland Street, coming up on a house in flames. Already, the fire had burned through a second-story porch and eaten its way to the center of the house.

Burns pulled into the driveway and saw two women in nightclothes huddled together, a man pacing.

He called 911.

It was 7:01 a.m.

“As soon as I said, ‘1 Scotland,’ one of the kids said, ‘We have people in the building,’” Burns said.

His heart sank.

Inside the house on the third floor, Tripp didn’t know what woke him, but he roused himself in the dark and opened the bedroom door.

Only then did he hear smoke alarms. He shut the door, then yanked it open again. Smoke billowed in.

Tripp, alone in one of four bedrooms that occupied the top level of the house, heard flames churning behind him.

“It sounded like a real, real hard wind,” he said. “Like a hurricane or tornado.”

Crossing the room, he ripped down the blinds and opened the window. He climbed up to crouch on the ledge.

Wearing nothing but blue khaki shorts, he stretched into the early morning air, fighting for every breath.

His buddy Ray could see him from the ground.

“Jump!” he yelled.

Fire exploded from the porch just to Tripp’s right, roaring through the house like it was made of paper.

Tripp could see the canal just below. He knew it was lined by a concrete slab covered with barnacles and oyster shells. He would have to leap.

Using his arms and legs for power, Tripp soared from the ledge, flames licking the soles of his feet where, later, he would find burns.

He spiraled, hitting the water on his back. A competitive swimmer since high school, he had no trouble once there.

“It was a helluva jump,” Burns said. “He must have jumped out 10 feet. And he was lucky.

“When he came out of the water he was hollering, I think, ‘Allison.’”

Despite earlier media reports, Burns said he didn’t see anyone else in the window from which Tripp jumped.

Ray was there to help him out of the canal.

The two college students turned to look at the three-story house swallowed in flames.

Burns, meanwhile, kept everyone else back from the house while he entered a door at street level.

“The air was thick,” he said. “And when I felt the door it was hot. I knew not to open it because it would cause a back-draft.”

Burns tried the entryway a second time. As he approached the door, he heard hissing — a sound that let him know there was fire on the other side.

Then the windows blew out and the house went up like a blowtorch.

Burns and the others saw an arm sticking out of a second-story window. They yelled and a man raised up into the window. His face was covered in soot, thick around the eyes.

“I said, ‘You’re going to have to jump,’” Burns said.

“He said, ‘The cars!’ I said, ‘Screw the cars!’ I told him to hang out of the window and just drop down” onto a SUV parked under the window.

He did.

Firefighters arrived. Burns said five minutes might have passed since he called 911.

All the screaming was coming from outside the house, Burns said.

Someone was yelling, “Where’s my brother?”

Tripp was pacing back and forth. He remembers neighbors, firetrucks, ambulances, sirens, blinking lights — a flash of blurry memories.

Getting oxygen on an ambulance, he suddenly realized which of his friends were dead.

“You saw who was in the ambulances and who wasn’t,” he said, his eyes in a deep stare. “You knew from that.”

‘IT’S LIKE THEY CAN HEAR ME’

The parents were in anguish, worrying how their daughters and sons must have suffered.

Then the North Carolina medical examiner assured them their children died quickly, in their sleep, after just a few breaths of carbon monoxide poisoning.

“He said they wouldn’t be laying there still if they were burned,” said Justin’s father Tom Anderson, who is a surgeon.

Carbon monoxide will incapacitate a person “in less than a minute,” he said.

“It was a tremendous amount of comfort,” Jeff Yelton said. “That’s what we’d been struggling with, the way they died.”

Richard and Debbie Perdue are attempting to reconcile the joy of survival with the sorrow of loss.

Their daughter Ashley turned 19 on Thursday.

“Sometimes I look at her and I smile. Other times I look at her and I cry,” Richard Perdue said.

“It’s almost like she’s been born to me twice now.”

In the past week, Tripp has found himself reaching out to his fallen friends.

“I’m actually talking to those seven people. I can actually have — whatever you want to call it — a prayer meeting,” he said.

“It’s like they can hear me.

“I talked to each one of them and said, ‘You know, I’m just going to try my best to get word out about what y’all are like, how you impacted my life.’ That gave me comfort.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was reported by Jeff Wilkinson in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C.; Gina Smith in Florence and Greenville; Adam Beam in Greenville and Clemson; James T. Hammond and Clif LeBlanc in Greenville and Columbia; and Dawn Hinshaw, Allison Askins and Liz Ruiz in