Authorities rule fire at Edwar suspicious
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on August 16, 2016 1:46 PM
A Sunday night fire at 102 W. Patetown Road is being investigated as being suspicious, said Assistant Goldsboro Fire Chief James Farfour Monday afternoon.
According to Farfour, the Goldsboro Police Department and the State Bureau of Investigation went to the scene of the fire on Monday and checked the scene for burn accelerants and sent samples off to the SBI lab for testing.
"We feel human hands were involved," Farfour said.
The Edwar Group, LLC, is housed inside the building located at 102 W. Patetown Road, and Farfour said on the scene Sunday night that 40 percent of the building was damaged by the fire.
"We found multiple points of origin and inconsistent burn patterns," Farfour said.
Farfour declined to go into further detail about the possible presence of burn accelerants or what else was present at the scene to make investigators feel as though human hands were involved because he did not want to give away too much detail about an active investigation, he said.
Farfour said Sunday night that the fire at the Edwar Group, LLC, had been burning "for a while" before firefighters got the call about the fire.
The call about the fire came out around 9:45 p.m. Sunday, and firefighters were able to get the fire under control within 15 minutes of arriving on the scene.
The fire was called in by three men -- Joel Smith, Mike Vann and Mike Crow -- who were driving by the building when they noticed smoke coming from the building.
According to a report filed on the Sunday night fire with the Goldsboro Fire Department, one of the doors to the business was unlocked, but shut.