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The southwest corner of 305 E. Spring St. in St. Marys collapsed on Thursday morning, killing one man and injuring another.
ST. MARYS - A 41-year-old St. Marys man was killed and another man was injured Thursday morning when the southwest corner of a 6,000-square-foot, two-story storefront building collapsed in downtown St. Marys.
Christopher R. Brown and another unidentified male were set to survey the property at 305 E. Spring St. at around 10:30 a.m. Thursday in preparation for an eventual structural remodeling, but before they even got all the way inside of it, property owner Todd Klosterman said, the men heard a noise coming from the building and quickly scattered.
"We were in the process of removing a wall and replacing it. We were surveying and putting in jack posts and they hadn't even got that far," Klosterman said. "Basically they opened the door. They were trying to open the side door to the building."
The unidentified man quickly ran one way, managing to escape potentially life-threatening injuries while Brown ran the other and was quickly buried under the rubble of the property's southwest corner.
When first responders arrived, the collapsed corner of the building resembled an open dollhouse. The inside of an apartment kitchen was visible on the second floor from the back of the property, with an oven almost hovering in mid-air on splintered wood flooring and the unit's front door open to nowhere as the floor had collapsed.
The contents of one of two occupied apartment units at 305 E. Spring St. was visible following the building's partial collapse on Thursday.
What was visible of the first floor was a mess of bricks, electrical wires and wood beams; above the second floor, the roof's pink insulation was unmistakable.
St. Marys Fire Chief Doug Ayers said he has never responded to a scene like it.
"I was on the other side of town at a detail (when I received the call) and I just immediately responded," he said. "We responded with an ambulance and an engine at the same time. The responding law enforcement, they had already shut roads down. I mean, it was a fantastic response from everybody involved."
Once the fire department arrived on scene, Ayers said he quickly concluded that the situation was more than his crew could handle alone and called for the St. Mary's Township Fire Department to respond and for county EMA director Troy Anderson to contact him.
"Once the county EMA director got ahold of me, then I told him that we needed some urban search and rescue teams because this was beyond our scope," he added.
Members of the Ohio Region 3 Trench Unit Urban Search and Rescue team from Toledo, Xenia and Columbus responded Thursday to the partial building collapse in St. Marys.
Specialists with the Ohio Region 3 Trench Unit Urban Search and Rescue team quickly responded with lights and sirens from Toledo, Xenia and Columbus, mayor Joe Hurlburt Jr. said.
The unidentified man "with visible injuries" was extracted and transported by ambulance to an area hospital for treatment, Hurlburt said. However, crews quickly learned that Brown was still somewhere in the property's debris.
Once the building was stabilized with lumber at around 1:30 p.m., the search and rescue team began working meticulously, slowly digging a tunnel under the rubble from the property's basement to search for Brown.
At some point during the search, what was left of the building began to visibly lean to one side. Concerned, Ayers himself was seen knocking on the nearby front door of 311 E. Spring St. to ask its residents to evacuate.
An excavator responded shortly thereafter, between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., and began sifting through a rubble pile between 305 E. Spring St. and 301 E. Spring St. Crews soon after blocked off the area visible to the public, and at 4:20 p.m., Brown was found deceased in the rubble and extracted.
The property at 305 E. Spring St. is in downtown St. Marys, catty-corner to the Circle K gas station.
However, crews were far from done. The rest of the evening, which they estimated might last until this morning, was dedicated to the disintegrating property's demolition.
The building was estimated by authorities to have been built some time in the 19th century, making it one of the oldest in St. Marys. Ayers couldn't say on Thursday when its last inspection was, but stressed his department conducts annual inspections of all commercial properties within its jurisdiction as required by law.
The building storefront was vacant but previously housed WarHawk Tattoo Co. Representatives from the business were on scene Thursday but declined to comment.
Klosterman said he'd been the property owner for 16 years and was at the Auglaize County Fair in Wapakoneta with his children when he received a call from a neighbor that part of the building had collapsed. Two of the building's four units were being rented at the time of the incident, but none of the occupants were at home at the time of the collapse.
City manager of community development Mike Burkholder advised that once the structure was completely demolished, crews planned to put up blockades in front of the property. The city's First Friday event downtown is still on for 6-9 p.m. today.
The unidentified, injured man was released from the hospital by 5:30 p.m. Thursday, per police chief Lucas Turpin. Authorities were not able to provide his name by press time.
Agencies that responded to the scene included the St. Marys Fire Department, St. Marys Township Fire Department, St. Marys Police Department, Auglaize County EMA, Auglaize County CERT volunteers, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Ohio Region 3 Trench Unit Urban Search and Rescue team, St. Marys Electric Department, St. Marys General Services Department and St. Marys Water Department.
Christopher R. Brown, 41, St. Marys, died Thursday in a partial building collapse in downtown St. Marys.
