Police and firefighters work outside the Poe Street duplex where 74-year-old Mary Ellen Bruns died Feb. 4, 2026. Credit: Zac Farber/Berkeleyside

County investigators have identified the 74-year-old Berkeley woman who died when her home caught fire Feb. 4.

Mary Ellen Bruns had lived at 1301 Poe St. for a little over a decade, and had struggled in recent years, according to her landlord. Her cause of death remains under investigation, according to the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office’s Coroner’s Bureau. 

Authorities have not said what started the fire, which is also still under investigation.

The coroner’s office was unable to formally identify Bruns at first due in part to extensive burns to her body.

Steve Moros, who owns the duplex where Bruns lived, said she frequently kept her unit filthy, with old food and dirt strewn around her kitchen, and cigarette butts on the floors.

Moros often asked Bruns if he could help her shape up the apartment but she would refuse, he said. She would also sometimes refuse to allow inspectors from the Berkeley Housing Authority, which administers the Section 8 housing voucher program for tenants like Bruns, to visit the unit, Moros said.

“I was really trying with the Berkeley Housing Authority, I did tell them many times that she needed help,” Moros said. “It just seemed like a lot more could’ve been done.”

Bruns also appeared to have had several health scares, with paramedics coming to her unit five or six times over the last two years, Moros said.

On Feb. 4, Moros was working at the Bancroft Community Garden, where he is garden coordinator, when a visitor told him there was a smell of smoke in the air. Moros thought it might be a garden beekeeper using smoke until a neighbor called to say Moros’s duplex, a couple parcels away, was on fire.

Moros and another neighbor rushed to the building and knocked on Bruns’s door, shouting for her to get out. Moments later firefighters arrived and carried out Bruns’s body, trying unsuccessfully to resuscitate her on a nearby sidewalk, Moros said.

Moros said authorities told him the fire appeared to have begun near a sofa in Bruns’s living room.

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