Just after dawn on New Year’s Day, a catastrophic fire broke out in the “Little Mogadishu” district of Minneapolis. The blaze began when an explosion blew out the windows in an upstairs apartment, propelling window frames and plywood debris into the street. The resulting fire sent flames twenty feet above the roof and took two days to extinguish. The bodies of two victims were found in the burned-out building, and a third man died later in the hospital.
News about the fire and explosion appeared briefly in the national media, and reporting on the incident continued through Friday in the local Twin Cities outlets. It faded over that weekend, and the story never really resumed the following week. Since that time it has all but disappeared. The two most recent media items were an announcement that a benefit will be held for the victims of the fire on January 24, and a report that four of the victims remain hospitalized.
The latter article makes this laughable assertion:
The cause of the fire that destroyed the Otanga grocery and displaced residents from the apartment above remains under investigation.The cause of the fire is not being investigated, because it can’t be investigated: all the meaningful evidence was destroyed when the fire-damaged building was demolished less than seventy-two hours after the explosion occurred.
More @ Gates of Vienna
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