An investigator looking into last week's fatal fire that destroyed a century-old home in Jefferson Township admitted that because of the extensive damage, he may never be able to determine what started the blaze.

“There's no apparent cause,” Trooper DuWayne Baird, a deputy fire marshal, said Wednesday. “I can't rule out the electricity, and I can't rule out the wood burner, or anything else for that matter.”

But the deadly fire on Nov. 19 at the 1½-story, Cape Cod-style home on Rockdale Road was not believed to be suspicious. The home was not insured.

Samuel E. Lawson, 53, died in the fire, which broke out around 2:30 p.m. Two of his three children, who had just finished their remote learning for the day, managed to escape the fire unharmed.

Lawson, who had apparently been sleeping on a living room couch, was unable to make it out.

Fire officials and investigators said his body was found in the kitchen against the interior basement door.

While not certain, Baird suspects the fire likely started in the basement, based on eyewitness accounts from interviews he conducted.

“But the damage was so intense,” he added, “I couldn't tell you where it started.” He estimated the damage at $150,000.

It was not known if Lawson, having been awakened by the smoke or heat, had gone to check the source of the fire or if he had tried to make it out the door in the kitchen leading out of the house.

“Maybe he went down (to the basement), couldn't get down and then came back up and closed the door,” Baird said. “Or maybe he just made it to the kitchen and just collapsed there by the door.”

An autopsy Nov. 20 determined that Lawson died of smoke inhalation, said Butler County Deputy Coroner Larry Barr. The manner of death, he noted, is pending the police investigation.

Also pending are the results of standard toxicology tests.

While Baird probes the cause of the fire, Trooper Travis November, a criminal investigator, is leading a separate investigation as it relates to Lawson's death.

November was conducting an unrelated out-of-county investigation Wednesday, and he was unavailable for comment.

Police said Lawson and his wife, Amy, owned the house. They had reportedly lived there for about 17 years.

Amy Lawson was at work in Allegheny County with the couple's youngest child when the fire erupted.

The Lawsons' other children — a 16-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son — were upstairs in their bedrooms. They reportedly came downstairs after seeing smoke.

They saw their father on the couch. He worked as a groundskeeper for Seubert and Associates, an insurance brokerage firm based in Pittsburgh.

“In a panic,” Baird said, “they tried to alert their dad. I don't know if they thought they had awoken him, and then escaped the house to get help.”

They went out the kitchen door and went to a vacant trailer home on the property that the children knew had a telephone landline. It was not immediately known if the son called 911, but he called his mother.

“That's how she finds out (about the fire) to come back,” Baird said, referring to Amy Lawson.

Around that time, employees and possibly others at Eastmen Tire Supplies, which is across the street from the house, apparently saw the fire and made their way over to yell for Lawson or to get inside to help.

But it was to no avail.

The community, meanwhile, has rallied to assist the family, starting a GoFundMe page and raising nearly $54,000 as of Wednesday.