After celebrating her daughter’s wedding last weekend, Louise Keith made pancakes and bacon for a dozen relatives before sending them home from the festive occasion. The 82-year-old Vallejo resident was known for her cooking, said Jackie Harris Greene, one of Keith’s three children.
“If you was hungry, she’ll feed you. You need some clothes, she’ll go in her closet and find you something to put on,” Greene said. “That’s the kind of person she was.”
Family members identified Keith as one of two women killed early Monday in a Vallejo house fire that shocked a large family and close-knit neighborhood. The second victim was a family friend who lived with and helped care for Keith, said Ariel Harris, her grandson. The friend was “always happy, always had a smile on her face,” he said. Open Vallejo has yet to confirm the identity of the second victim.
“It is heartbreaking for my whole family,” Harris said. “It’s just kind of hard to believe.”
Harris, a Georgia resident, said his mother also lived with Keith, but was not home at the time of the fire; she left town late last week for a honeymoon cruise with her new husband.
Firefighters were dispatched around 2:45 a.m. Monday to a home on the 100 block of De Paul Drive in North Vallejo, according to department spokesperson Kevin Brown. They found a single-story, single-family home engulfed in heavy flames.
Crews established an aggressive offensive attack on the fire, with assistance from the American Canyon Fire Protection District, according to Brown. Emergency personnel rescued Keith and transported her to a local hospital, where she died. Another woman and two dogs were pronounced dead at the scene.
Brown said both women were “older females,” but did not release their names. The Solano County Coroner’s Office has not publicly identified either victim.
The fire started in the living room in the front of the house, according to Brown. Firefighters contained the fire within half an hour, and neighboring homes were not damaged, he said. Officials have not publicly identified the cause of the fire.
“The Vallejo Fire Department extends its deepest condolences to the friends and family of the deceased,” Brown wrote in a Monday news release.
On Tuesday afternoon, the house sat vacant, with the entryway and a front window boarded up by wood.
Cortez Dameron, a neighbor, said his kids woke him when the fire broke out. He ran outside and saw flames erupting through the roof of his neighbor’s home. Dameron said he called several people to alert them of the fire. He then grabbed a garden hose and turned it on his neighbor’s house, but the flames were too powerful to contain, he said. Concerned the fire could jump to his property, he began dousing his roof and trees in water.
“I can only imagine what the families are going through,” Dameron told Open Vallejo. “They were genuine people.”
