89-Year-Old Dies While Trying to Escape Fire

Mary J. Winn was a force in her Montecito Heights neighborhood.

The feisty 89-year-old was a fixture on Homer Street, a largely Latino area situated next to the Pasadena Freeway. She would maneuver herself in a wheelchair each day one block to help out at a senior citizens center.

“No, I could do it myself,” Winn would tell her neighbors when they offered to assist her.

She was known as a pack rat who also kept at least seven cats, two dogs and two birds. But the messy one-bedroom home she lived in for almost 45 years was a concern to neighbors.

Early Sunday morning, Winn died trying to escape from her home after a fire broke out. The fire was possibly caused by the misuse of electrical sockets, said Bob Collis of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Fire officials said the clutter kept her from using some sockets while overloading others.

“I don’t think it was a mess to her,” said neighbor Mary Sanchez, 86. “I think she was used to living like that.”

Friends said she had amassed many sentimental items: trophies, stuffed animals, photographs, magazines dating to the 1960s. She also kept numerous bags of dog and cat food, clothes and other items piled as high as six feet.

Most of all, Winn was remembered as a good neighbor who took good care of her animals and had been commended by the city for her volunteer efforts.

As he stepped inside the charred house, Javier Torres, 31, said he was practically raised by Winn. They met when he was 13 and desperately looking for a job. Too young to work at most places, Winn said he could cut her grass and feed her pigeons. They became friends, and Winn bought him his class ring when he graduated from high school. As she grew older, the tables turned and he became one of her caretakers. Two or three times a week he would drive from the Moreno Valley to visit, grocery shop and help around the house.

When his two daughters celebrated birthdays last month, Winn gave them each a television.

Torres said Winn moved here from Colorado when she was 18. She was married and divorced twice, he said, and worked as an accountant for a bakery and later worked for the city Department of Recreation and Parks.

For the past eight years, she had been using a wheelchair, he said.

“I had told her for the longest time that too many animals weren’t good for her,” Torres said. “I would have to throw things away when she wasn’t around--like gallons of water bottles that she would try to recycle.”

Thinking about her brought tears to the eyes of Hervey Chapman, owner of a nearby pet shop.

Chapman said he knew Winn first as a customer 30 years ago, and then as a close friend. She would buy so much pet feed, he said, that he eventually began making deliveries to her home twice a week. Recently he began bringing her food as well.

“Her house was a total wreck, but she knew where everything was,” he said, smiling at the memory. “She was in that stupid wheelchair, but she had a lot of fight in her. She helped a lot of people.”