Fire Destroys Hillside Home

The incessant beeping of an alarm disturbed the twilight as Joey Sammut took in the sunset with his girlfriend over beers outside his Arch Beach Heights residence last week.

When yelling and smoke also interrupted the moment, Sammut abandoned the horizon and sprinted uphill while also calling 911 on his cell phone. A woman who he said looked dazed stood outside the home two doors from his own and told him another person was still inside the burning house.

Black smoke obscured Sammut’s view of the doorway, a few steps below street level, though he could hear a woman’s shouts inside. “I’m yelling at her, ‘come towards my voice’,” Sammut said in an interview Monday, recounting his actions. “She’s saying, ‘No. My birds, my birds’.”

When Sammut, who is 6’ 4”, finally glimpsed a figure inside, he says he took a few steps into the smoke-filled entry and grabbed the woman in a bear hug even as she fought to get away.

“Shortly after I pulled her out, flames started shooting out the doorway. We could have both perished,” said Sammut, 24, who described the house-destroying blaze “that sounded like a monster.”

Phone records show said Sammut was one of the first 911 callers, but Fire Chief Jeff LaTendresse could not independently confirm Sammut’s rescue account.

And the owner of the destroyed home, Richard P. Bisson, also disputed Sammut’s recollection of events, though he was not at home when the fire erupted about 6 p.m. “My wife came out of the house; she was only talking about going back in for her birds,” he explained in an interview Wednesday.

For at least six years, his wife, Paola Perrini, kept three parakeets, which were nesting on five eggs, Bisson said. She attempted to put out the fire herself with one of several extinguishers in the home, said Bisson, who described the fire’s origin as probably electrical in nature and in a closet.

Bisson learned of the fire when he picked up phone messages after returning to Los Angeles from a business trip and arrived home about 10 p.m. to find a battalion of fire trucks. “The home and the art work and the furniture are replaceable,” said Bisson, who said about a dozen contemporary pieces of art were destroyed by fire. The displaced couple stayed with friends in the fire’s aftermath, but intend to move into a rental this week. “We’ll rebuild the same, just better,” said Bisson, who moved to Laguna with his wife in 2006.

What is expected to be ruled an accidental fire extensively damaged the three-level home, LaTendresse said. Investigators are still working to establish the cause and a dollar loss, he said.

Sammut works as a Laguna Art Museum security guard, studies ceramics at Saddleback College and currently assists local ceramic artist Marlo Bartels on a public art installation in Brea. He struggles to explain his own reaction to a stranger’s peril. “You hear someone shouting; I’m the sort of person who thinks you have to do something,” he said.

LaTendresse praised firefighters for halting the blaze from spreading to neighboring structures from a tight perimeter, a two-foot-wide access stairway alongside the home that descended down the hillside from the street level. He says fire came close enough to blister paint on the neighboring home to the south.

Neighbors spilled into the street in the early evening to watch the spectacular fire, contained by seven fire trucks and three ladder trucks from fire departments in Laguna Beach and Newport Beach last Thursday, March 10.

LaTendresse said one owner and a friend reported that they were in the top-level kitchen when they smelled smoke and tried to descend to the second level, where the fire started and where pet birds were kept in cages. “Smoke and heat pushed them out,” he said. The house had a third bottom level floor as well, he said.

Even as firefighters doused the blaze, Sammut said he seized the chance to talk with the woman he claimed to rescue, whose name he still doesn’t know. She thanked him, he said.

“I feel super fortunate to have been at the right place,” said Sammut. “I feel so grateful she’s alive.”

He also has a new appreciation for the work of firefighters. “I saw them cut open the garage. It was like a war zone,” he said.

Strangely, Sammut encountered another fire only months ago. He moved to Laguna Beach last year shortly before a power line sparked a wildfire near his rented home in Canyon Acres. “That was shocking and so close,” he said, but pales compared to what he describes as a “life-changing” experience last week where he believes he saved a life.