MT. PENN, Pa.- Neighbors on Hollywood Avenue, a normally quaint and quiet street in Mt. Penn, say Wednesday evening brought a surreal experience.<\/p>\n
They knew police were conducting a welfare check on a man who lived on the street, but suddenly, the block was being evacuated from their homes.<\/p>\n
One neighbor says she and her sister were inside with her two babies when they were told to get out.<\/p>\n
“Literally, she grabbed a baby, I grabbed a baby, and we ran up the street, no shoes, like nothing,” the neighbor recalls to WFMZ. “My kids just woke up from their nap; they had full diapers. It was hectic.”<\/p>\n
Emergency responders flooded the scene, trying to gain access to the house in question.<\/p>\n
“Once they were inside, they didn’t find him on the main floor or the upper floor,” says Central Berks Police Chief Justin Johnson.<\/p>\n
“They started to access the basement, opened the door, and then suddenly there was a big flash of fire that came up, so then they retreated out of the house, unknowing what they were walking into,\u201d Johnson added.<\/p>\n
Fire crews put out the fire, then Berks County emergency response teams and other responders used drones to look inside the house.<\/p>\n
“Some members ended up going inside and clearing the house and made their way downstairs to find the gentleman unfortunately deceased by a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” says Johnson.<\/p>\n
“You wouldn’t think that this kind of stuff would happen, but I mean, it can happen anywhere, I guess,” says one of the neighbors.<\/p>\n
Police say they do not believe the man was dead before yesterday. They say now the focus of the investigation is on the source of the fire flash that came from the basement.<\/p>\n
The investigation is being done by Central Berks Police and the state police fire marshal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MT. PENN, Pa.- Neighbors on Hollywood Avenue, a normally quaint and quiet street in Mt. Penn, say Wednesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298008,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[214,128,130,129,213],"class_list":["post-298007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}