Family believes fire that destroyed home was intentionally set; investigation ongoing

DAYTON — A woman says she woke up 10 days ago to smoke and flames engulfing her porch and had to lead four members of her family to safety out a back door. Now, her family is very suspicious of how the flames began.

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Helen Swanson has lived in her home on W. Fairview Avenue in Dayton for more than 40 years. Less than two weeks ago, her family went to sleep with nothing on their front porch, but that’s where a fire started in the middle of the night.

“I heard my granddaughter upstairs. I guess she woke up and said, ‘Granny, do you smell something burning?’” Swanson recalled.

Swanson then spotted flames as she looked out her window. She then cracked the front door for a quick peek.

“I opened up that front door and the blaze — and I slammed the door back,” she said.

Her granddaughter said she couldn’t get out through the back door, so Swanson ran back there, found the keys, and scrambled out with her three teenage granddaughters and her one-year-old great-granddaughter.

“If I could tell you right now, I don’t know what I did to tell you the truth,” she said.

Swanson let News Center 7 inside the home to see the destruction, including the now charred crib her great-granddaughter slept in. Somehow, her 19-year-old granddaughter’s baby album survived.

Dayton firefighters have not ruled on what caused the fire, but a video from a neighbor’s Ring camera shared on News Center 7 at 6:00 appears to show a suspicious car parked across the street. Now, the family thinks the fire was intentional.

“Caught a fire, for what reason? Who? Why? I don’t know,” Swanson said.

She said she simply couldn’t understand the motivation to do something like this.

“Working hard to have something that belonged to me, that I didn’t have to worry about nobody else taking it from me,” she said. “But someone did.”

Swanson hopes her family and a contractor can restore her house, but her insurance company canceled her coverage several months ago over a claim for a new roof.

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