"Suspicious" fire engulfs family-owned tire shop in South LA just weeks after another blaze

Flames engulfed a family-owned tire shop in South Los Angeles early Thursday, a fire authorities have described as suspicious as it follows another blaze at the building just weeks earlier. 

Bright red, towering flames overtook the building as highly flammable stacks of tires inside kept the blaze going around 3:30 a.m., according to Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Erik Scott. After firefighters put it out, Scott said the fire department was moving on to its investigation, working to put pieces of evidence together.

"Well it is a suspicious fire — that's why you see some of the arson investigators behind us that are combing through the debris and talking to witnesses and looking at the burn patterns," he said, adding that authorities are taking into consideration the fact that another fire happened there earlier this month.

"This was the site of a previous fire in the predawn hours of Aug. 2," Scott said. "So our hearts go out to the business owners, who have been battling this."

The tire shop, located in the 6900 block of Vermont Avenue, has been owned by a family in the area for 20 years. The owners were at the business early Thursday, as firefighters put out the blaze, and said their store is a complete loss. They also said surveillance cameras at the building stopped working when the fire broke out, so it's hard to see what exactly happened.

In a GoFundMe, the owners said their store sustained $6,000 in damages from the fire earlier this month.

Scott said the fire department is "taking this very seriously" as an arson investigator was assigned to the Aug. 2 case, and now, there will be two more arson investigators looking into the Thursday morning fire. The arson investigator in the case earlier this month has been getting ahold of surveillance video, interviewing witnesses and making visits to the site to collect evidence, he said.

When the other fire broke out, surveillance video captured someone throwing some sort of object over a fence just before the blaze started. Scott said investigators are taking that footage and other evidence into consideration as they try to figure out what happened.

"It's certainly a concern," Scott said, drawing comparison between the two incidents. "There's a similar pattern of it being, you know, predawn hours at the same location. It appeared to be an exterior-type fire that has moved in."

He said firefighters managed to put out flames that had spread to a home behind the tire shop, stopping it from being further damaged. While the home has been yellow-tagged, he said, residents have been allowed to go back inside since the damage wasn't too severe.