Montreal family speaks out after fire kills beloved dog when security alarm fails

globalnews.ca:

A family in the Montreal suburb of Pointe-Clare says they’re left devastated following the loss of their home in a Sept. 8 fire, which destroyed all of their possessions and killed their dog.“Absolute sadness.

It just brings back so many bad memories,” Marisa Di Meglio said.The fire started in the late afternoon when no one was home. Di Meglio’s husband Robert Gillen, had just left to pick up their son Jacob from his high school football practice.By the time they returned home minutes later, the fire had already started with their dog stuck inside.The father and son entered, but couldn’t find their beloved Echo.“I feel really bad that I couldn’t save the dog and I think about that a lot and how I feel like I failed him in a way,” Jacob Gillen said.It took firefighters several hours to extinguish the flames.

Only a shell remains and the remaining structure needs to be demolished.“When I went out into that room there was such intense heat coming up from the basement, it was wild,” Robert Gillen said.The family is living in a rental home while trying to get their lives back together. But in the midst of the turmoil, they’re in a dispute with their home alarm security system provider, Securitas.“Nobody from the alarm company called 9-1-1.

And it was confirmed that they hadn’t. They had no clue that the house had burned,” Di Meglio said.Di Meglio says Securitas told them that their alarm system wasn’t connected to the central service because her home alarm batteries had been low since last July.