QUINCY - The town of Quincy was rattled Sunday morning, when a fire at the corner of 1st Street and East Main Street destroyed three buildings, displaced fourteen people, killed one person and injured another.

According to reporting by the on-line Plumas News, the first report of the fire came in at 1:04 AM on February 12th, called in from a mobile phone. Fire engines from Quincy Fire, Greenhorn Creek VFD, Long Valley Fire and Meadow Valley Fire responded to 2104 and 2110 East Main Street, which were either partially or wholly engulfed in flames by their arrival. Law enforcement and emergency medical services also arrived quickly, transporting the injured victim to Plumas District Hospital for treatment while the fourteen displaced individuals were taken to find shelter in a nearby motel.

The passerby who reported the blaze, 16-year-old Oliver Litchfield, is an 11th-grader at Quincy High School. He was returning to his home when he spotted the blaze and quickly placed a call to emergency responders, before acting as a Good Samaritan himself and taking point to aid the residents in evacuating – even encouraging one resident to escape via a second-story window and physically catching their fall. Later in the morning, he was back on the scene helping firefighters roll up hoses and exit the scene while the coroner came in to locate and examine the deceased individual.

Three structures were involved in the fire – a standalone home at 2104 East Main, a smaller single-person dwelling directly behind it on the same parcel, and a two-story apartment building at 2110 East Main. The cause of the fire is under investigation, but according to Quincy Fire the blaze began in the home and spread to the smaller unit and the apartment building. Sylvia Thomas, who managed the apartment building, arrived on the scene shortly after the blaze began and, according to Plumas News’s coverage, heard “fire alarms and small explosions” from the blaze – the latter suggesting that some manner of fuel canisters or pressurized gasses were caught up in the fire, though likely not the cause.

2110 East Main has been in the news before this incident, though not for good reasons. In 2015 this building was the site of a horrific child abuse case briefly drawing state and national media attention to Quincy after a Plumas County Sheriff’s Office welfare check discovered a badly abused 9-year-old girl and a pair of traumatized 12-year-old twin siblings. The investigation resulted in the arrest of 17-year-old Gonzalo Curiel and 39-year-old Tami J. Huntsman, both of Salinas, and led to the discovery of two other abducted children – ages three and six years – within a storage unit in Redding. Huntsman is reportedly the sister of Wayne A. Huntsman, an arsonist who started the King Fire in 2014 in El Dorado County and was eventually apprehended in Portola.