Elkhart officials on Wednesday identified the person who died in a fire on Myrtle Street on Tuesday morning.
Elkhart police have identified a man found dead in a house fire Tuesday as 18-year-old Christyan Roberto Cortez. Cortez was already dead when firefighters pulled him from a burning apartment in the 100 block of Myrtle Street, along with a dog that had died.
At about 7:40 a.m. firefighters were called to the 100 block of Myrtle Street, where they found fire shooting out the windows of a two-story duplex. The tenant in the back apartment had escaped without injury.
The 911 caller said a person and a dog were possibly still inside the front apartment, said David Cashwa, Chief of Operations with the Elkhart Fire Department. The first crew arrived in four minutes, before the first hose crew, and entered the apartment looking for the person. They found them quickly and pulled them outside but they already had died, Cashwa said.
“Testament to the fact that they were in an area that they probably shouldn’t have been in, safety-wise for them because they had a lot of melted gear and some damaged equipment, just due to the fact of they went into an extraordinarily superheated condition in order to try and make any kind of rescue if there was a possibility,” Cashwa said.
The case remains an active death investigation of the Elkhart County Metro Homicide Unit while autopsy results are pending.
A second adult male told police he had escaped injury by jumping from a second-floor window. Firefighters are investigating the fire's cause.
