People killed in Twin Cities mobile home fire ID’d as woman, her adult daughter

The people killed this week in a Twin Cities mobile home fire were identified Thursday by a family member as a woman and her adult daughter.

Police were alerted about 3:20 a.m. Wednesday to the blaze at the Valley Green mobile home park in Jordan near Hwy. 169.

Mary Lavrenz told the Star Tribune that the fire claimed the lives of her mother, 67-year-old Ruth Benjaminson, and her 36-year-old sister, Callista Noltee.

Lavrenz said her father, 72-year-old Patrick Kehoe, was spared serious injury and will be released soon from HCMC. She said three dogs died in the blaze.

Lavrenz said the fire started in Noltee’s room, which had been her brother’s until he moved out a couple of months ago.

Her brother, 27-year-old Quinten Wicklund, “knew something was wrong when I was blowing his phone up,” Lavrenz said. “He was very close to our mother and sister.”

Lavrenz said neither her father nor fire officials have addressed how the blaze might have started. She said she fears it might have been related to smoking, given that all three were smokers.

Both of Lavrenz’s parents are hearing impaired, she said. Her father is fully deaf and doesn’t speak, and her mother needs hearing aids but doesn’t wear them when sleeping. Lavrenz said she was unsure about what fire alarms might have been in the home.

Cozette Linton, a grandchild of Kehoe and Benjaminson’s, wrote in an online fundraising campaign begun to help the family recover from the fire that “Ruth had initially made it out of the house safely, but in an act of immense love and courage, she ran back inside to save her family.”

Kevin Aguirre, who lives across the street, said his sister awakened him, “telling me that our neighbor’s trailer was on fire. ... All of sudden, the windows burst with the flames.”

Aguirre added that he “tried to go inside the trailer and help them because I knew the [layout] of the house. ... But the officer told me to get out because the fire department was coming.”

He described the family members as all being “great people and well-known in the trailer park community.”

According to police:

Fire and police personnel arrived to find the home fully engulfed in flames. Kehoe found his way out of the home, but the two women were still inside.

Fire personnel brought the women outside and started life-saving measures that proved futile.