Elderly man found dead after Sealots house fire

A 77-year-old man was found dead af­ter a fire de­stroyed his home in Sealots on Wednes­day.

Po­lice said of­fi­cers from the Besson Street Po­lice Sta­tion re­spond­ed to a re­port of a fire at a house along Con­ces­sion Dri­ve at 11 am. When they ar­rived, they found a two-storey un­fin­ished con­crete struc­ture still smoul­der­ing af­ter the blaze had been ex­tin­guished by fire of­fi­cers.

Af­ter the fire was put out, of­fi­cers searched the house and found the charred body of Ray­mond Thomas ly­ing on his back in a bed­room on the ground floor.

His son, 29-year-old Je­re­my Alexan­der, iden­ti­fied the body at the scene. He told po­lice he left home around 9.40 am to go to work, leav­ing his fa­ther alone, and on­ly learned about the fire af­ter be­ing alert­ed by a neigh­bour.

A dis­trict med­ical of­fi­cer lat­er vis­it­ed the scene, pro­nounced Thomas dead and or­dered the re­moval of the body pend­ing a post-mortem at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre.

Crime scene in­ves­ti­ga­tors processed the area, while of­fi­cers from T&TEC dis­con­nect­ed the elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply to the house.

The cause of the fire re­mains un­de­ter­mined as in­ves­ti­ga­tions con­tin­ue.