By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

MEXICO – A fire that destroyed a three-story Middle Avenue apartment building late Monday night, began when a toddler accidentally knocked over a lighted candle in the living room, investigators said Tuesday in Mexico.

No one was injured, but a family of four and another tenant at 25 Middle Ave. were displaced, losing everything, Fire Chief Gary Wentzell said Tuesday morning.

The building, which is owned by Rosa Simmons-Gaffney of Bourne, Mass., was fully insured. It had been extensively remodeled inside, with new fixtures added this summer, he said.

“This was not a piece-of-junk house,” Wentzell said. “It had brand-new everything. The landlord was definitely keeping up on the building.”

He guessed damage would be well over $100,000, but declined to provide a more accurate estimate.

Left homeless were Nathaniel and Callie Ollis, and their 3-year-old daughter, Willow, and 8-month-old son, Aiden, and first-floor tenant, Matt Montgomery.

State Fire Marshal fire investigator Chris Stanford of Augusta said Tuesday afternoon that the 9:35 p.m. fire originated in the Ollis’ living room on the right side of the second floor of the 33- by 57-foot, four-unit building. Two of the apartments were vacant.

He said Willow Ollis knocked the candle over after her parents took her brother upstairs to put him to bed.

The toddler then tried unsuccessfully to put the fire out, Stanford added.

Soon, a battery-powered smoke detector in the kitchen sounded.

“We heard the smoke alarm go off, and Nate ran down ahead of me, saw the fire, then yelled back to get the baby out,” Callie Ollis said Tuesday afternoon at the fire station.

Dressed in a T-shirt over orange thermals and shoeless, she said she ran back, got the baby and returned, seeing Willow standing shoeless in her bedroom doorway, crying, on the other side of flames.

The Christmas tree and presents under it were ablaze.

“Willow kept saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She was really bummed, because she lost her teddy bear and blankie. She was crying and crying, and saying her bear was dead. Oh, God,” Ollis said.

They ran out a back door through the kitchen and told Montgomery to leave. He alerted the firefighters.

“By the time we got outside, we could see that Willow’s room was on fire,” Callie Ollis said.

Fighting the blaze was made more difficult because firefighters weren’t aware that the metal-roofed building also had metal ceilings. Additionally, they didn’t know it was full of voids and crannies a fire could get into, but firefighters couldn’t.

“It was wicked, wicked heat, because of the metal ceilings. It didn’t look that bad at first, but the fire had spread across the whole room,” he said.

At one point, they thought they had it under control, until they learned it had shot into the attic, spread to the roof and was burning downward at them.

“We chased it back and forth and screwed around with it for over an hour, but it had spread everywhere,” Wentzell said.

Rumford firefighters cut ventilation holes in the roof and a side wall, out of which flames shot, forcing them to hastily move Mexico’s extended aerial ladder.

Soon, it became too dangerous and Wentzell ordered out everyone inside.

“The way that building was designed up on that third floor, at least, there were 12 or 14 doors going into closets and rooms. They were just traps. The fire was all through there,” he said.

In hindsight, and if they’d known about the metal ceilings, Wentzell said they would have cut larger vents and attacked the fire from above sooner than they did.

Using larger, high-pressure hoses and deck guns, they got it under control some time after midnight. Hot spots were then suffocated in foam and about 50 firefighters had left by 2 a.m. Tuesday.

Stanford said the second and third floors sustained heavy fire damage, while the first floor had extensive water damage.