ST. MARYS, Ohio (WLIO) - Officials have confirmed that one person has died after a building collapsed in St. Marys Thursday morning.
Fire officials say that the call came in around 10:30 AM for the collapse, which happened at 305 East Spring Street. After hours of work, crews were able to reach the body of 41-year-old Christopher Brown of St. Marys, who had died in the incident. Another person was able to be removed from the debris and was transported to Grand Lake Health with non-life-threatening injuries. That person has already been released from the hospital. That person's name has not been released at this time.
Signs on the front of the former Warhawk Tattoo shop show that the building was under repair.
The first floor of the building, formerly Warhawk Tattoo, has been vacant for several months. The second story held apartments, but no one was inside at the time. The building was being worked on prior to the collapse.
St. Marys Fire Chief Douglas Ayers detailed the careful and painstaking process of the recovery effort of the second victim.
"Strike teams went in from the inside to the outside, shored up the building. Took quite a bit of lumber to get it shored up to where it was safe. As they tunneled through the rubble, they tunneled all the way through it, still didn't find the body. At that point, they just determined that it would be safe to bring a backhoe in and very cautiously scratched just a small layer of bricks off at a time. And as soon as they they had multiple people watching with binoculars, and as soon as they saw a small portion of the body, that's when the backhoe stopped and they ended up hand digging the body out," said Ayers.
After the victim was recovered, the remainder of the building was torn down and cleared from the site.
