17-Year-Old Injured in New Year’s Eve Fire Dies

A teenager severely burned in a Val Verde house fire Thursday died Saturday afternoon, succumbing to respiratory and cardiac arrest several hours after he had surgery to remove tissue destroyed by the burns, a hospital spokesman said.

Sean Williams, 17, was pronounced dead at 2:24 p.m. after doctors struggled for nearly an hour to revive him, said Larry Weinberg, spokesman for the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital. Sean had suffered second- and third-degree burns over 43% of his body.

The teenager’s half-brother, Patrick Crawford, 7, sustained third-degree burns over 65% of his body. The boy also underwent surgery on Saturday, to help ease his blood flow. Patrick was listed in extremely critical condition after the operation, Weinberg said.

Two county investigation teams have different opinions about the origin of the New Year’s Eve blaze, which appeared to have started around the family’s Christmas tree. The fire was ruled accidental by Los Angeles County Fire Department investigators on Friday, said Gary Wise, a fire dispatch supervisor. But the case was turned over to the Sheriff’s Department, whose arson and homicide units are investigating the blaze as a possible crime, said Sgt. David Halm.

“It’s been called suspicious and they are continuing their investigation,” Halm said.

News of Sean’s death came as a shock to neighbors who had expected the teenager, who was not as critically injured as his little brother, to pull through.

“He was in good spirits yesterday,” said Rocci Goodell, a next-door neighbor who visited Sean on Friday. “The first question he asked me was, ‘How’s your family?’ So I said, ‘Don’t worry about me. Just get better.’ . . . I can’t believe he didn’t make it.”

Sean, a polite young man with a beautiful voice, sang in the choir and managed the basketball team at Valencia High School, where he was a student, Goodell said.

Weinberg, the burn center spokesman, said that “it is not uncommon in burn cases this severe for major body systems to simply fail. [The organs] work very, very hard following the trauma to repair the damage to the body, and sometimes they fail.”

Two women were also injured in the fire. The boys’ aunt, Dawn Carter, 45, fractured her ankle jumping from a second-story window to escape the flames. She was discharged Saturday from County-USC Medical Center, said hospital spokeswoman Adelaida De La Cerda. Patricia Lynn Martin, 20, who Goodell said was Sean’s former girlfriend and a boarder at his house, remained in critical condition with second- and third-degree burns over 18% of her body at County-USC Medical Center, De La Cerda said.

Weinberg said Sean’s family had asked the public to donate frequent-flier miles so that relatives on the East Coast could make the trip to Los Angeles. To make a donation, please call the family’s pastor, William Epps, at (800) 685-6273 and leave a message.