‘I could have lost my life’: Apartment fire survivor recounts blaze

Brandy Andrews didn’t hear smoke alarms going off when her apartment complex caught fire. No sprinklers rained over her or her two children.

The only reason she woke up at 5 a.m. on June 6 was because her neighbor banged on her door.

She opened her home security camera app and saw the man, whom she doesn’t know by name, surrounded by flames. He was screaming expletives while pieces of the ceiling fell down around him.

Andrews yelled for her 15-year-old, Olivia, and 7-year-old, Messiah, to get their shoes. The front door was blocked by flames, so the family jumped over the 6-foot wooden patio wall. Their 60-pound dog, King, couldn’t make the jump, but a neighbor offered to jump into her burning apartment and rescue him.

The man had run from his apartment so quickly he was only wearing shorts and shoes.

“When I finally sat and watched the footage, the flames were already behind me in our entrance, already above us. It was on our right, on our back, in our front,” Andrews said. “Our whole floor was covered.”

The fire at the Tides on Charleston apartment complex, 6501 W. Charleston Blvd., killed a man, injured seven others and left 18 people homeless, including the Andrews family.

The Las Vegas Fire Department said Building 18, where Andrews lived, was ruled a total loss.

They had not determined what caused the fire as of Friday.

As her family ran from the wreckage, Andrews said, she saw bloodied people jumping out second-story windows. She said one neighbor broke an arm, another broke a leg, and one came out with a large cut. Andrews found out later that she had cut her leg climbing over the balcony.

“We were seeing things and couldn’t really stop,” she said. “Everyone was just trying to survive.”

No sprinklers

Residents gathered at the leasing office, where Andrews said she hugged and thanked the neighbor who banged on her door when he went outside for a smoke break that morning and discovered the fire. At the office, management told her they could put her in a new apartment, but it would require a $500 increase in rent.

“I’m trying to gather my thoughts,” Andrews said. “I could have lost my life, if not my children’s lives, and you’re talking about moving me into an apartment, with a rental increase?”

Management could not be reached for comment despite multiple requests from the Las Vegas Review-Journal since the fire.

Andrews did not renew her lease, and her family is staying with her sister while she saves money to rebuild their lives. Now she wants to know whether the apartment complex was up to code.

“No smoke alarms went off,” she said. “I keep my smoke alarms up to date. I literally just changed my batteries in the first week of May. I went to the store to grab all the batteries to change them. The building didn’t have any sprinklers, and there’s no smoke detectors on the outside.”

One fire extinguisher sits in the hall between every four apartments, she said.

The complex has seen three major fires since 2020. Lantana Apartments owned the complex for a decade until 2021, when it sold the complex to a Los Angeles-based company identified as “Tides on Charleston owner LLC” on Clark County assessor documents.

The new owner did not list a phone number or a person in charge, and its high-rise address in Los Angeles did not contain a business that matched the business name given to Clark County.

Messiah is a student at Hancock Elementary School, where Principal Sarah Payne said they are collecting donations to help the family. An online fundraiser started on behalf of the Andrews family had raised more than $3,000 as of Friday afternoon.

Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.