Mitchell County Jail Fire Bakersville, North Carolina 2002
If one was to search for a North Carolina town resembling the fictional Mayberry, one need look no further than Bakersville. The small town of roughly 450 people is the county seat of Mitchell County, situated about 50 miles from Asheville, near the border with Tennessee. On May 3, 2003 its two story jail held 17 inmates, some serving their sentences for misdemeanors and others being held pending trial. The jail had been built in the 1950s, and was operated by a jailer rather than the county sheriff. In addition to the 17 inmates there was one prisoner being held in a holding cell on the first floor.
Around ten o’clock on the evening of May 3 the jailer smelled smoke, and in a short time the building filled with heavy smoke. The jailer and a trustee attempted to free the prisoners held on the ground floor – the jail’s four cells were required to be opened manually – but were unable to either breathe or see in the heavy smoke and were forced to leave the building. Two deputies responded to the alarm and managed to open the cells of the first floor, evacuating eight inmates. They were not aware of the prisoner in the holding cell on the first floor.
Over 100 firefighters fought the fire, which gutted the building before it was extinguished. When the fire was finally brought under control, the bodies of eight men were recovered from the building, seven whom had been held in the cells on the second floor and one in the holding cell on the first floor. All of the eight dead had died from smoke inhalation. Thirteen others were treated for various injuries, including the trustee who had tried to assist the jailer in releasing the inmates. The fire was determined to have been started when cardboard boxes were ignited by a portable heater.
At first no charges were filed as a result of the fire, but investigations arising during the settlements of various lawsuits filed by the estates of the dead inmates led to the state alleging that the fire had been set deliberately as a means of facilitating the escape of an inmate, abetted by the trustee who was not locked up at the time the fire started. The inmate, Jesse Davis, had died in the fire. The state alleged that Davis’s wife and the trustee, Melissa Robinson, had deliberately placed the boxes near a heater to create the appearance of an accidental fire.
The allegations were that the two soaked the boxes with an accelerant, probably fingernail polish remover, and that one of the two then ignited the boxes. The fire spread faster than they had anticipated, and Davis, who was incarcerated for multiple felonies, was not able to have been set free. The charges were eventually dropped by prosecutors for lack of evidence. The jail was never rebuilt, and a memorial to the victims of the fire was erected on the site. Mitchell County has since housed its prisoners in a neighboring facility under contract.