ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Wednesday, April 24, 1996              TAG: 9604240063
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: C-5  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER 

MOM WHOSE 4 KIDS DIED IN FIRE LAUDS CITY

Patricia Leftwich held up a color portrait of her four children as her testimony supporting a rental housing inspection program.

"These were my babies," she told Roanoke government leaders at a public hearing Tuesday night, "and it took them dying to get you on the road."

Her children, all under 7, and her 46-year-old mother died in a January fire in the Southeast Roanoke apartment Leftwich was renting. "Don't let it happen to anybody else," she implored City Manager Bob Herbert and his cabinet officers.

Leftwich and a dozen other Roanokers commended the city's inspection proposal as a major step against unsafe housing.

Leftwich said it softens her grief that after the fire, neighborhood leaders and city officials accelerated their advocacy of rental inspections.

"It gives me some comfort that when this goes in that no other family will have to go through what I did," she said. "If we'd had this program, maybe this house might not have been in the shape it was in."

Though no criminal charges were filed against Leftwich's landlord, fire investigators found no smoke detectors or fire walls between apartments, both requirements of the city's building code. Fire officials traced the blaze to an extension cord attached to a heater the family used to warm water pipes. Landlords used Tuesday night's hearing to plead for better behavior by renters.

"Please do not break our windows," landlord Frank Roupas said he was asking of all tenants in Roanoke. "Take your trash out every night, and please, please, please pay your rent."

"If I spoke to my tenants like they have spoken to me," said Roupas. "I would have been laid to rest a long time ago in beautiful Evergreen Burial Park."

He donated burial plots there for the Leftwich family.

Herbert said he expected City Council to consider a vote on the rental inspection plan May 20. If it is approved, three inspectors will begin work this summer and be joined by two others in January.

Every two years they would inspect each of the 5,000 units of rental housing in Old Southwest, Gainsboro, Hurt Park, parts of Southeast and other neighborhoods nearest downtown.

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