Cigarette Starts Fire After Woman Dies : Camarillo: Elizabeth Seager’s death was attributed to emphysema and heart disease. Her mobile home was gutted.

An elderly woman died of emphysema and heart disease Monday morning while sitting in an upholstered chair and smoking a cigarette that triggered an intense fire that gutted her mobile home in Camarillo.

She was identified as Elizabeth Seager, 77, by the Ventura County coroner’s office. Her neighbors and a relative described her as a recluse, but a friend of birds and other wildlife in the mobile home park.

A cousin, Rosemond Demetropoulos of Sherman Oaks, said she was always lecturing Seager on the dangers of smoking.

“She would just laugh,” Demetropoulos said. “She was absolutely a recluse. She didn’t even go to her mailbox the last few years.”

Demetropoulos said her cousin grew up in Los Angeles. She never married but had a friend, an investor, “who left her an estate for life when he passed away.”

After an autopsy Monday afternoon, Coroner Warren Lovell said “the best evidence is that she was dead at the time of the fire and died from emphysema and coronary disease. She was a heavy drinker and a heavy smoker.”

Neighbors said another elderly woman living alone in the same community, the Camarillo Springs Country Club Village, was fatally burned six years ago when she fell asleep while smoking.

In this fire, however, the woman died in her chair before the cigarette ignited the chair and mobile home.

The fire was probably smoldering for almost an hour before flames erupted inside the white frame mobile home at 48 Irena Ave., said William O’Bryan Hager, a fire investigator for the Ventura County Fire Protection District.

A neighbor, Gene Gantt, 71, chairman of the community’s disaster committee, said he and others attempted to put out the blaze with garden hoses but the fire was too intense. The mobile home’s windows exploded from the heat, he said.

At first, investigators believed that Seager died in the fire after having fallen asleep while smoking.

“This is a typical (cigarette) smoking fire,” Hager said Monday morning before the autopsy. “Neighbors said she was a chain smoker.”

Charred cartons of cigarettes were discovered near the body, investigators said.

The blaze, which broke out at about 7:25 a.m., was quickly extinguished by firefighters. Damage was estimated at $50,000 to the mobile home and $20,000 to its contents, fire officials said.

Seager moved to the 250-unit Camarillo mobile home community overlooking Camarillo Springs Golf Course when it opened about 18 years ago, her cousin said. From the beginning, she kept to herself.

“She would very seldom answer the door,” said Gantt, a longtime resident. “She was very quiet.”

Another neighbor, Harriet Anderson, 68, said Seager was so shy that one day, when Anderson brought over some freshly made cinnamon rolls, she just opened the door a crack to take them.

“She called me the next day to thank me,” Anderson said.

Seager, who stood barely over five feet, did not own a car and hired staff from the gated community to do her shopping, according to Marilyn Lyons, the park’s manager.

But if she was a recluse in her relations with humans, she was a trusted friend of the wildlife abounding in the hills behind the community.

Deer and wild birds, such as quail, would gather daily around her mobile home while she fed them bags of seed and other food, neighbors said.

In fact, Anderson recalled, there were so many birds flocking to Seager’s abode that a next-door neighbor complained about the mess that they were creating on his roof.

“The birds seemed to congregate on his roof and wait for her to feed them,” she said. “He would have a fit.

“It didn’t bother me that she was a recluse. She was friends with the animals.”