The Farmville Police Department is still investigating the circumstances behind the Nov. 6 First Ave. couch fire.
As reported in last week’s issue of The Rotunda, Farmville Fire Department Second Lieutenant Robert Hammock said the department received reports of the fire at 11:46 p.m. Farmville police officers were able to put out the blaze with fire extinguishers in a matter of minutes. The fire department came to the scene to extinguish any remaining flames.
While there is no con- firmed connection between the fire and President Barack Obama’s re-election, the fire started shortly after the media announced the results on election night.
We've speculated as to whether it was celebration or protest or just being silly,” said Longwood University Police Department (LUPD) Chief of Police Bob Beach. Both the LUPD and the Farmville Police Department monitor the other’s radio traffic, and Beach said LUPD responded to the fire along with the town’s police force. Longwood junior and First Ave. resident Callie Fuller was puzzled when her room- mate came into her room around 12:30 a.m. early Wednesday and told her there was a burnt couch near their house. She had heard some commotion outside earlier in the night but assumed it was just her neigh- bors.
When Fuller went outside to see the remnants of the couch, she was shocked be cause no one had come to her house earlier. “We didn’t hear any fire alarms, we didn’t have a cop come to the door … It was quiet.”
Fuller called the local police to inform them of the burnt couch, but she said the department was already aware of the situation. She said they told her the fire department had already responded to the fire and had placed the couch on the side of the road. The remnants of the couch would be picked up in the morning. Fuller was never formally informed or questioned about the fire. “No one has ever come to us [about the fire],” she added.
According to Beach, a situation like the couch fire is dangerous because “it draws needed resources from the larger community.” Such an event occurred on Feb. 19 during a snow storm when fire trucks that went to the scene of a Buffalo St. couch fire were needed to put out another fire in the community. One fire truck even wrecked due to the inclement weather. While Beach said last Tues- day’s fire was “less consequential in that we weren’t in the middle of a snowstorm,” it was still a dangerous situation and people could have been injured in a number of ways. Beach said while there is no proof that the person who set the couch on fire is a Longwood student, the fire’s proximity to campus can still “tarnish” the university’s reputation. “It’s a shame be- cause every time some sort of act like that occurs, the community as [a] whole sees it as disrespectful.
Beach is confident that
somebody will eventually come forward and say some- thing on Facebook or some Tweet … and the word will come out.”
Beach believes the majority of students are great young leaders, but five to 10 percent of the population make the others look bad with foolish actions.
While some people view actions such as this as “learn- ing” or a “rite of passage,” Beach wishes people could do so without tarnishing the reputations of others.
Beach said, “All of those great things the university does, it’s overshadowed when someone decides that they’re gonna do something like that [that] to them appears to be a prank or some- thing not consequential.”
