4 children die in Roseland fire, 2 adults critically injured

BY STEFANO ESPOSITO AND JON SEIDEL Staff Reporters September 8, 2014 5:50AM

Updated: September 9, 2014 2:14AM

Eric Patton Smith spent much of Monday morning standing close to the empty brick apartment building, as fire investigators traipsed across a courtyard littered with shattered glass and charred debris.

And then a bit before noon, Patton Smith pulled himself away to face a grim task: identifying the remains of his little girl, Eriana Patton Smith.

Beautiful in every sense of the word, he said of his 7-year-old daughter, one of four children who perished in a fire early Monday in the apartment building in the Roseland neighborhood.

Two adults, including the childrens mother, also were critically injured in the extra-alarm fire on the Far South Side, officials said.

The blaze began at 3:25 a.m. on the second floor of an 18-unit building in the 11200 block of South Vernon Avenue, authorities said. It was not being treated as a suspicious fire, Fire Media Affairs Director Larry Langford said.

Eriana and her three siblings were found in a bedroom of a third-floor unit, he said.

There were no working smoke detectors in either the unit where the children were found or in the second-floor unit where the fire started, Langford said. But hard-wired detectors were sounding in the buildings hallways, Langford added.

Found in the bedroom with Eriana were Shamarion Coleman, 12; Carlvon Clark, 13, and Carliysia Clark, 15.

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4 children die in Roseland fire, 2 adults critically injured