FREEDOM — The person who reported a propane leak at a house on Belfast Road last week where two people died and two were taken to the hospital was a caller from the Boston area who said his cousin was at the house at the time and called to alert him of the incident, according to a transcript of two 911 calls.
“Three are very sick and one is not even moving,” the caller said, asking if someone can come right away.
The caller, whose name is redacted in the transcript, said his cousin who called him from the Belfast Road house doesn’t speak English.
“He said he can smell the (unintelligible) he thinks the propane’s leaking,” the caller said.
Freedom firefighters and Waldo County Sheriff’s officials responded to 555 Belfast Road after receiving the call just after 6 a.m. Oct. 22 to find two men dead, a man and a woman sick and another man uninjured. Officials said later that a pipe on top of a wall-mounted propane heater which was supposed to vent the propane outside had been separated from the heater, causing the leak. The heater was in a utility room in the house.
A week after the incident, sheriff’s officials are keeping investigation details close to the vest. They would not identify the names of the victims, both dead and alive, or anything about the conditions of those taken to the hospital.
Waldo County Sheriff’s Sgt. Cody Laite said Tuesday that he had no new information to impart.
“The investigation remains active and ongoing,” Laite said. “As a result of that, we’re not releasing any additional details.”
Most of the information surrounding the deaths of the two people and the hospitalization of two others has come from Freedom fire Chief Jim Waterman. Contacted Tuesday, he said he had no new information.
Waterman said late last week that there were no carbon monoxide detectors in the house when officials arrived early on Oct. 22. He said the concentration of carbon monoxide was 40 parts per million — which he described as a high concentration.
According to Waterman, the venting pipe was disconnected at the top of the heating system, and it couldn’t have separated on its own. It “had to have been disconnected somehow,” Waterman said.
The person who called 911 to report the leak told a dispatcher that the people at the Freedom house did not speak English. Asked what language they do speak, the caller told the dispatcher that it was Cantonese or Mandarin.
When Freedom firefighters arrived at the scene, they found a man dead in the living room and another dead in a bedroom off the living room, Waterman said. A man and woman were taken to MaineHealth Waldo Hospital, previously known as Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast.
The man who was uninjured has a phone with a New York City area code, he said. A message left at that number Tuesday was not returned.
Attempts to reach the number of the person who called 911 were unsuccessful.
The property includes the house and several outbuildings which were raided in May by law enforcement agencies as the site of an illegal cannabis growing operation, part of what authorities have called a network of illegal grow sites across rural Maine. The sites have generally been on residential properties in rural areas.
Federal authorities have said the grow sites may be operated by Chinese transnational criminal groups.
At the Freedom property after the deaths occurred, there were no visible signs that marijuana was being grown. Waterman confirmed he didn’t find any evidence of marijuana there.
The house and about 10 acres of undeveloped property on Evergreen Lane, about 2.5 miles from the house, are owned by Austin Zhen of Brooklyn, New York. Waterman said last week that he didn’t believe Zhen was at the house Oct. 22.
Waterman also said the man who was uninjured could speak some English but couldn’t tell him the identities of the dead men. The sheriff’s news release from last week said the home was occupied by only four people.
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