Fire at Summit Inn Kills Innkeeper

I just found this story about a fire in a local Inn, not more than 4 miles away from my place:

FRANKLIN – Rhonda Lampright woke Thursday morning to the piercing sounds of smoke alarms and screams of “get out, get out.”

She and fiancé Robert Marek of Beaufort, S.C., and six other guests were staying in rooms on the second floor at the back of the historic Summit Inn overlooking downtown Franklin.


Flames cut off any chance for escape down the staircase. Instead, the guests climbed through windows to the roof.

In the front part of the inn, owners Charles “Chuck” Poser and his wife, Nancy, were also trying to escape the fast-moving fire. Both made it outside.

Charles Poser, who authorities suspect might have been searching for the family dog, went back inside.

The father of three adult daughters never came out. On Thursday afternoon, authorities found human remains inside the collapsed structure. Nancy Poser, his wife of 32 years, is hospitalized in a unit in Augusta, Ga., with burns on 80 percent of her arms and face.

Coverage by other media:

Franklin Press

MSNBC

I checked the chamber of commerce site, and they've already taken the inn off the directory, but it's still in the Google Cache, which will available until the page is indexed again.

And the website is here, and my snapshot here, in case it, too, gets taken down. If I get out that way later on this weekend, I'll take a few shots to give you an idea of the commanding view the place had. I had featured the Inn in a science fiction story I had written back in 1997 in a fan tribute story for the centennial of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds," in which the Martians landed in modern day Franklin.