Concord Fire Victim, 83, Identified Months Later Through DNA

CONCORD, CA — An 83-year-old woman died in a pre-dawn fire at her home in Concord in December. Fire crews responded shortly before 6:20 a.m. on Dec. 19 to the 1400 block of Coventry Road, less than a mile east of the Concord BART station and a few lots south of the busy Clayton Road corridor.

An incident report from the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District said crews arrived and learned there was a high likelihood of an elderly person inside what was described as a "hoarder home" on fire.

They then found the body after extinguishing most of the flames there and stopping the blaze from spreading to neighboring homes.

A fire district spokesman said that morning that the victim appeared to be trying to escape before succumbing to the fiery conditions in the home.

Fire investigators later learned the victim "lived there alone and rarely came outside of the structure," the report states.

For months, the Contra Costa County coroner's office considered her a Jane Doe, but last week was finally able to confirm her identity: Ethel Smith.

Coroner's investigators knew Smith, the home's owner, was the likely victim but needed to confirm it with family members or via other means.

No next of kin for the victim immediately came forward following the fatal fire, so the coroner's office went through its normal identification process, starting with fingerprints.

In cases where no prints are available or don't lead to a match, investigators then use dental records as the next step toward identification, according to the coroner's office.

If there is no dental match, the coroner's office then sends DNA from the victim to a state Department of Justice DNA laboratory in Richmond to see if there is a match to someone already in state and national DNA
databases, a process that can take several months.

The case was pending in the DNA lab in January when Bay City News reached out to one of Ethel Smith's relatives using public property records, an obituary for a family member in Alabama, and a social media search.

After learning of her death, Dustin Smith, Ethel's grandson and a resident of Montgomery, Alabama, then contacted the coroner's office and was eventually mailed a DNA swab test that he returned with a sample to try to obtain a match with the fire victim's sample.

On March 5, the state lab in Richmond notified the coroner's office of a positive match, meaning Ethel could be released from the coroner's jurisdiction to a local funeral home.

Since December, the burnt rubble of the home on Coventry Road has remained there with a white van parked in the driveway behind a chain-link fence that now surrounds the property until plans can be made to clean it up.

Dustin Smith said from Alabama that he has been working with the county public administrator, which handles cases of Contra Costa County residents who die without a will or don't have someone in the area able or willing to administer their estate.

"Overall I guess they've been doing a pretty good job, and I'm trying to do the best I can," he said.

Her burial is scheduled for April 6. A funeral service isn't planned since her family lives out of the area, but Dustin said he plans on coming to Concord as soon as he's able to help handle her affairs.

"My grandmother was special to me ... she raised me from like 6 weeks old to about 3 years," he said.

"Even though I never went back to live with her in California, she would make it a point to send gifts every holiday, every birthday, not just to me but to give to my friends as well too," Dustin said.

She was born in Alabama but married Dustin's grandfather James and they moved out to California.

"She was a Cali girl even though she was from the South," he said. "Her favorite thing was the Los Angeles Lakers, so she would send us a bunch of Lakers or Oakland Athletics gear, things like that."

He said she loved listening to hip hop music too.

"Her favorite artist was Tupac Shakur and she loved Biggie too, which I thought was quite interesting," he said.

"She was a dedicated grandma," Dustin said.

The house fire where Ethel Smith died was eventually extinguished a little over an hour after crews responded.

The cause of the blaze is undetermined but it is not considered suspicious, Fire Capt. George Laing said.

Laing said the large number of items in the home "may have led to the intensity of the fire" and also "made it more difficult for crews to enter."

He said there was "the possibility of really unpredictable and explosive fire growth," so crews battled the blaze from the outside until they could get the upper hand on it.

No other injuries were reported, but a fire engine sustained a minor scratch when a Concord police officer at the scene accidentally backed into the vehicle.

By Bay City News Service

Photo by Dan McMenamin/Bay City News Service