Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Man Dies in Mobile Home Fire : Lancaster: The blaze was started by a portable electric heater. Lenny Harper’s girlfriend and a couple in the guest room escape uninjured.

A Lancaster man died early Monday morning after being trapped inside a mobile home by a fire started by a portable electric heater, authorities said.

Lenny Harper, 32, didn’t wake up until smoke from the fire had filled the mobile home, making it impossible to see him, said his girlfriend, Diane Gray, 40. She escaped outside and smashed a window, shouting for him to follow her voice, but he kept wandering aimlessly inside the trailer.

“He was in a daze,” she said. “He didn’t know where he was because of the smoke. He just couldn’t come through.”

A couple in the guest room was able to escape uninjured, Gray said.

The fire started just before 1:30 a.m. at the Desert Breeze Mobile Home Park at 45014 27th St. East. The residence was completely engulfed in flames when firefighters from Los Angeles County Fire Station 117--located within sight of the mobile home, about a quarter-mile away--arrived a few minutes later.

“At that time there was obviously nobody alive inside the building,” said Mike Godde, one of the firefighters who extinguished the blaze.

Harper, who picked up aluminum cans to help Gray make ends meet, was found lying in a hallway of the charred residence. Fire officials said he probably died of smoke inhalation before the flames could reach him.

The mobile home park was purchased by the city of Lancaster at a foreclosure auction in March after the previous owner failed to make payments, said Michael Adams, the city’s senior project coordinator. The city decided to close the park because most of the 32 trailers were in disrepair. Residents in all but seven homes had been moved when Monday’s fire occurred.

Gray said she had been planning to move this week from the mobile home, which has been frequently burglarized and vandalized during the seven years she lived there.

“Lenny and I were planning to get married,” she added.

The heater apparently ignited some cardboard nearby, but one of the neighbors appeared to get the fire under control using a hose, Gray said.

“It didn’t look like anything where the whole place was going to go,” she said.

But a stack of boxes near the flames, which Gray had packed for her move, caught fire and the blaze spread quickly through the residence. She said she escaped by jumping through a living room window that had been broken out earlier when juveniles were throwing rocks at her mobile home.

Fire officials estimated the damage at $25,000. Gray said she lost everything inside, including the $1,100 the city gave her to help her move to a new trailer.

“I’ll be staying with friends,” she said. “I feel a little shaky about doing things on my own right now.”