Man and His Dog Dead After House Fire

One man and his dog are dead after an early morning fire ripped through his house over the weekend in Biloxi.
News 25’s Gina Tomlinson has the details.
The family of 79-year-old Ollie Lamey Jr. is left in pieces after he and his dog were found dead in mounds of burnt debris of what used to be his home, a place his granddaughter Shania Bissonette remembers visiting since she was little. “I had rushed over here to check on grandpa, but they had already said he was dead.”
Responding to a call about the house completely up in flames, a team of Biloxi firefighters rushed to Lamey’s home on Seal Avenue just after 5:30 a.m. to try and calm a fire they say you could see burning from the Ocean Springs Bridge. Biloxi Battalion Chief Anthony Trosclair said, “The whole sky was orange. It was going pretty good by the time the crews arrived.”
Lamey’s son, daughter and girlfriend were able to make it out alive, but Lamey and his dog weren’t so lucky. Bissonette says she saw him just weeks before he died and that everyone called Lamey “Bubba.” “He’s worked his whole life to save up everything he could in his house and he just tried to do everything he could for anybody.”
At the time of the fire, Lamey was in his bedroom. His daughter says she tried to save him, but this whole area was filled up with smoke and she says she couldn’t see a thing. “By the time they found out where he was located in the fire, the fire was too intense so they had to pull the guys out,” said Trosclair.
The Biloxi Firefighters tells New 25 oxygen tanks found in the house made the fire more intense when they exploded, the blaze too big to save Lamey’s life. Bissonette says the oxygen was for Lamey’s girlfriend who has asthma. She says his girlfriend was rushed to the hospital because she couldn’t breathe and then told her boyfriend for years couldn’t make it out of the flames. “She’s tore apart. She didn’t get burned, but she’s just highly upset,” said Bissonette.
Firefighters say it took about an hour to put the fire out of the house that stood in Biloxi for over 40 years.