Riverview Apartment Fire Victims Reunited With Missing Cat

RIVERVIEW, FL – For 24 families who lived in the Allegro Palms Apartments, the night of June 13 will forever be ingrained in their memories.

That’s the night lightning struck the Riverview apartment complex at 5501 Legacy Crescent Place, causing a massive fire that destroyed their homes and most or all of their belongings.

But residents say there were also miracles in the midst of tragedy.

Among those residents is Tammy Guy who had just sat down to dinner with her 16-year-old daughter, Reese, at the Cheesecake Factory in Westfield Brandon mall that evening when she received a call informing her that her home was on fire.

The single mom and daughter rushed home to find a battalion of fire trucks and police cars overflowing the parking lot.

“It was such a helpless feeling to just stand there and watch your home burning and not be able to do anything,” Guy said.

It wasn’t the thought of losing family photos or irreplaceable mementos that had Guy in tears.

Several years ago when her grandmother was diagnosed with dementia, Guy promised her she’d care for her beloved tawny-spotted cat, Sandy. Guy’s grandmother died a year ago but the cat helps Guy keep her grandmother’s spirit alive.

As Guy watched the flames consume one of two rear buildings of the apartment complex where she lived, she herself was consumed with fear for the cat trapped inside her apartment.

“It didn’t know if she was alive or not,” said Guy. “I was begging them to please save my cat. But, of course, they were busy putting the fire out.”

It took 60 firefighters several hours to get the flames under control. By 2 a.m., when the smoke began to clear, Guy was initially told the cat didn’t survive. Then, she was told the cat wasn’t found inside her apartment, that she must have escaped when they forced open the apartment doors.

At least, that gave Guy some hope that Sandy had survived the fire.

The nearly 100 people left homeless weren’t allowed to enter the apartment complex because of the danger from the structural damage.

But that didn’t stop Guy from haunting the complex parking lot each day, frantically calling the cat’s name.

“I became known as the cat lady,” said Guy. “I started passing out ‘lost cat’ fliers everywhere I went and posted pleas on neighborhood Facebook pages asking people to be on the lookout for Sandy.”

At one point, she received a response from a woman who found a stray cat about a mile away from the apartment complex. Guy promptly drove over to see the cat but it wasn’t Sandy.

The following Saturday, Guy and her daughter returned to the apartment complex to continue their search for the missing cat.

To their surprise, when they looked up at their former apartment, they saw Sandy perched on the stairs leading to their apartment door.

Against all odds, the house cat that had never been out of the apartment since Guy moved there three years ago, had found her way home.

“I have no idea where she was all that time,” said Guy.

Unfortunately, as any cat owner will concede, a frightened cat won’t necessarily come when called. Despite Tammy and Reese Guys’ attempts to coax the cat to them, Sandy stubbornly maintained her vigil on the steps behind the makeshift fence that prevented anyone from entering the burned-out building.

“I couldn’t get near her,” said Guy.

For liability reasons, the apartment complex’s insurance company wouldn’t allow anyone to access the building except fire officials.

Lucky for Guy, she happened to know such a person. Her brother, Gary Guy, was a former Hillsborough County Fire Rescue captain. He was permitted into the building to retrieve the cat.

“He brought her down wrapped in a blanket, and we took her right to the vet right away,” said Guy. “She had smoke in her lungs, her stomach was empty and she smelled like smoke but, otherwise, she was healthy.”

The mother, daughter and cat are now staying with a friend until they’re able to get back on their feet.

They lost all of their recently purchased furniture, electronics and many other possessions.

But Guy said they gained much more than they lost, namely their faith in their fellow man and their belief in miracles.

“The Allegro office staff, specifically Julie (property manager), Vanessa and Maria, have been amazing throughout this unfortunate event. These ladies were in the line of fire through no fault of their own and I witnessed nothing but compassion and understanding from them all.”

In addition to helping her search for her cat, Guy said the women in the office wrote down the clothing sizes and various needs of the displaced residents and then set aside donations for specific families as they were brought into the office.

She discovered another unlikely angel in Tony Vilanova, restoration manager at Interstate Restoration & Construction, the company charged with retrieving whatever possessions survived the fire, smoke and water damage.

“Even after his crew had left for the night, Tony stayed and went through our hot and humid apartment in his dress clothes to help us gather items, including my daughter’s childhood drawings that I had completely forgotten about.”

Images via Tammy Guy

(For more local news from Florida, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Tampa Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app; download the free Patch Android app here.)