CONIFER, Colo.—Minutes before a wildfire consumed his house, Sam Lucas told neighbors he was concerned about a plume of smoke coming his way. He and his wife, Linda, were packed and ready to go if they got a phone call from the Jefferson County sheriff’s office telling them to evacuate, neighbors said.
It’s not clear whether that call ever came. The couple’s bodies were found at their fire-ravaged home in the steep, heavily timbered hills southwest of Denver.
Sam Lucas was 77. Linda was 76.
“Very religious and very nice. The best neighbors you could have,” said Eddie Schneider, whose home near the Lucases’ was bypassed by the wildfire.
Authorities said it appears the fire started Monday when a prescribed burn from the previous week sprang back to life in high winds. Parts of the 6-square-mile fire were still burning Wednesday.
The sheriff’s office has said automated phone calls went out to about 900 houses in the area, ordering residents to leave.
“I don’t think he (Sam Lucas) ever got a Reverse 911 call, because I never got one, unless they called me after I left,” Schneider said Wednesday. “And then it was too late. It was moving in on us.”
Another neighbor, Mary Anne Ellis, said she and other neighbors tried to warn authorities Monday that a fire was burning.
“We kept calling and saying there was a problem,” but she said she doesn’t think they were taken seriously.
Other residents said they didn’t get an evacuation phone call either, but they left on their own or when warned in person by a local volunteer firefighter.
Schneider said a firefighter warned him to leave, but he doesn’t think the Lucases got the same warning.
“One of the guys from the Inter-canyon (Fire/Rescue)—that’s local—came up and said, ‘You’ve got to go.’ My biggest mistake was I should’ve said, ‘Did you tell Sam and (Linda) to go?'”
Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said she was not aware of the residents’ assertions about having no warning until they were raised at a news conference Wednesday evening.
Kelley said earlier that investigators did not know why the Lucases didn’t leave. Sheriff’s deputies and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation were looking into the deaths, she said.
A Red Cross spokeswoman said Wednesday that the Lucases’ family did not want to comment publicly.
Friends called Linda Lucas “Betty White” because of her resemblance to the actress, Ellis said.
“Gentle and sweet,” Ellis said. And Sam Lucas was “just as gentle and sweet as she was,” she said.
“These were wonderful people,” Schneider said. Sam Lucas would take out the Schneiders’ garbage when the Schneiders were out of town, and the two men would plow each other’s driveways in the winter.
“Every once in a while, I’d go up there and I’d be plowing their driveway, and she’d tell me, ‘Come on in. I’ve got some breakfast for you,'” Schneider said.
Schneider was already feeling the loss of his neighbors.
“For me, there’s a big hole there because Sam and them are not going to be back,” he said.
Other neighbors will need time to rebuild their homes, Schneider said.
“I’m the only one there. It’s like everybody else has left, and I’m the lone wolf,” he said.
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