Day turns sour for city man as pickup burns
It was one of those days for Daniel Stutz.
He was almost home late Wednesday morning with the final load of gravel for a driveway project. Days earlier, he had bought a new set of tires for the pickup truck he was driving.
Then about 11:15 a.m., the truck caught fire. And it was no ordinary fire, as vehicle fires go.
“We thought the whole neighborhood was on fire when we came across the bridge,” said Butler Fire Capt. Kevin McAfee.
But responding firefighters, after making it over the General Richard Butler Bridge, found that the only thing burning on Euclid Avenue was Stutz's 1999 GMC 3500 pickup.
“It was fully involved, inside and out,” McAfee said.
The 56-year-old Stutz, however, was unharmed.
“I noticed smoke coming from (the truck),” he said, “and got out.”
He saw more smoke and before he knew it, the pickup was in flames.
“The front end was already on fire when I got here,” said Butler Patrolman Nicholas Shulik.
The cause of the fire was not immediately clear.
“The exact cause? We don't know,” McAfee said. “It could be a broken fuel line. It could be an electrical problem. It could be something else.”
A fire crew put out the blaze with compressed-air foam. But the charred red truck was a goner. The blue trailer in tow was spared any damage.
Stutz had rented the trailer to haul the gravel to his home nearby on Highland Street.
“It was my last load,” he said.
During the fire, one of the front tires exploded.
“I bought all new tires just two weeks ago,” he said, shaking his head.
A wrecker eventually showed up and towed away the truck, which had a Florida license plate on the back of it.
“I bought it five years ago from a horse farmer in Ocala (Florida),” said Stutz, who splits his time between the Sunshine State and Butler.
He only bought his home here last year and has been fixing it up ever since.
Stutz' mother, in her 80s, later showed up at the scene. He said he purchased his home, in part, so he could be closer to her.
“He's a good boy,” his mom said.
