Lewis County Sirens.com

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

A woman fishing in the Cowlitz River south of Ethel yesterday was rescued after her boat struck a log and dumped her into the icy water.

A man in another boat heard her yelling and tried to grab her but couldn’t and called 911 about 7:15, according to the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office.

Crews responded to the area near Brim and Spencer roads on both sides of the river and finally spotted the woman who had pulled herself onto a tree above very heavy rapids, Lewis County Fire District 8 Chief Duran McDaniel said.

Firefighters from Toledo in two boats they put in the river pulled the woman to safety, he said.

McDaniel said the area, about a mile and a half upstream from the Blue Creek Hatchery and Boat Launch, is rather remote and it was getting to be dusk when they got to her.

“She’s very lucky she had a passerby,” McDaniel said. “That saved her life; there’s no doubt about it.”

Jeanine McDaniel – no relation to the fire chief – 47, from Fife, was transported to Providence Centralia Hospital to be treated for scrapes and possible hypothermia, according to the sheriff’s office.

She was boating alone and not wearing a life jacket, sheriff’s Sgt. Rob Snaza said. It’s a good reminder of how important safety precautions can be, Snaza said.

Neither Snaza or Chief McDaniel knew how long she’d been in the water.

“That river rises and falls on a regular basis,” Snaza said. “When you’re fishing, you should always be wearing a life jacket.”

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Lewis County Superior Court Judge Nelson Hunt today seemed to give clues as to how he might resentence a former Centralia High School student serving a nearly 93 year prison term for a 2007 drive-by shooting in which several bar patrons on a sidewalk escaped injury.

Hunt imposed the time on Guadalupe Solis-Diaz Jr. almost six years ago, but the state Court of Appeals last year tossed out the virtual life sentence referencing various matters that should have been handled more thoroughly, given that he was a juvenile.

The appeals court called it clearly excessive.

“This is ridiculous,” Hunt said, focusing on one of the several criticisms of the local court proceedings and the then-teenager’s then-defense attorney.

The unanimous opinion of the three-judge panel stated local attorney Michael Underwood mistakenly indicated the teen was “declined” as a juvenile and tried as an adult, when in fact no decline hearing was held to determine if the teen’s maturity and mental development warranted prosecution as an adult. The case was actually “auto-declined” by operation of a statute.

Hunt told the attorneys in his courtroom today he helped draft the rules for the so-called automatic assumption of jurisdiction in Washington. He called the issue Underwood’s misuse of a word.

Solis-Diaz, dressed in red jail garb and chains, sat quietly in the courtroom while the judge, his defense attorney Robert Quillian and Lewis County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Sara Beigh addressed matters to be taken care of before the new sentencing hearing.

Quillian was requesting more time and also for an authorization to expend funds for an expert to evaluate his client’s emotional and mental maturity.

He’s already been waiting in the local jail nearly a year, the judge said, at an estimated cost of $88 per day when he is the responsibility of the state Department of Corrections, Hunt pointed out.

“All so I could be told that Mr. Underwood made a mistake by not advising me this was not a decline and when I imposed a sentence within the standard range, that that was somehow incorrect,” Hunt said.

Solis-Diaz is 23 years old. He was 16 when the offense occurred.

He was arrested in August 2007 after gunfire from a car was sprayed along the east side of South Tower Avenue in Centralia, outside two taverns. Witnesses testified it was gang-related. Solis-Diaz maintained he was innocent.

He was convicted by a jury of six counts of first-degree assault, one count of drive-by shooting and one count of unlawful possession of a firearm. State law required the time for the assaults to be served consecutively and there were 30 years of mandatory time for firearm enhancements.

The issue comes back to Lewis County Superior Court not from a direct appeal, but a personal restraint petition. The challenge was made in light of a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, specifically a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that held a sentence of life without parole is forbidden for a juvenile who did not commit homicide.

However, the appeals judges focused on the deficient performance of the court-appointed attorney. Among the reasons cited, was Underwood failed to produce or request a pre-sentencing report which could have shed light upon issues related to the teen’s mental and emotional sophistication.

Quillian said he would like to postpone the hearing currently scheduled for the end of this month, as the specialist he was working with took leave for a family illness.

He proposed to hire Dr. Ron Roesch from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia who specializes in forensic juvenile criminal work. Quillian told the judge Dr. Roesch would review the case materials, conduct a battery of tests on his client and submit a report concerning the matters at hand.

Hunt said he wondered if such an evaluation is even a proper topic to consider.

“It’s his maturity level back then he’s going to need to assess, and he won’t be able to do that,” Hunt said.

Quillian said his reading of the appeal decision was that his client was entitled to present the information of an expert before getting sentenced.

“I think it would be remiss for Mr. Solis-Diaz not to have the benefit of these services,” Quillian told the judge.

Judge Hunt noted the Supreme Court has already said everybody knows juveniles are different in that they engage in more reckless behavior. He pondered if Quillian’s request meant all juveniles accused of crimes deserved an evaluation by an expert.

“Why do we need to spend $6,000 of public money to find out what everybody already knows?” Hunt asked.

During the half hour hearing today, Hunt pointed out he imposed a sentence that was authorized by law, by statute Solis-Diaz was treated as an adult and noted the defendant was at the time, 16 years plus 362 days old.

The judge told the attorney he didn’t want the chosen expert to be someone that charged more than twice as much than the $75 per hour the original attorney was paid. Dr. Roesch estimated 30 hours of time at $200 an hour.

He said he would consider approving the expense if Dr. Roesch submitted a report but didn’t incur travel expenses to provide live testimony.

The new date for sentencing was set for Dec. 17, and expected to last half a day.
•••

For background, read:

• “Appeals court gives Centralia teen a “do-over” on 90-plus-year drive-by shooting sentence” from Wednesday September 19, 2012, here

• “Former Centralia High School student getting a shot at shorter sentence from 2007 drive-by shooting” from Thursday January 24, 2013, here

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CENTRALIA – She was a 40-year-old mother of three boys, none of whom lived with her.

Tina Thode didn’t work, but labored intensely in recent years to overcome drug addiction.

Described by those who knew her as both a girly girl and a tomboy, she was a woman who would entice housemates to gather in the kitchen with her homemade tacos or be content passing time exploring nearby woods.

On the final weekend of her life, Thode called 911 asking for help getting off the banks of the tree-lined Skookumchuck River. It was after dark, about a quarter mile from her north Centralia home. An intense but unsuccessful search was abandoned, and it seems as though that was the last anyone heard from her. Two days later, a pair of 15-year-olds floating down the river on inner tubes discovered her body partially submerged on the river’s edge.

What killed Thode won’t be known for sure until the Lewis County coroner reports his findings; he’s waiting for toxicology test results.

What exactly she was doing at the river that evening, and for the next day and half remains a mystery as well.

Her good friend Matt Mitchell is among those grieving and trying to make sense of Thode’s death. He was with her the morning of the Saturday she got lost. After she died, he helped her parents clear out her studio apartment at the end of Pike Street.

“I was told she was alive until Monday, noonish,” Mitchell said. “She didn’t starve to death or drown.”

Centralia Police Department detective Sgt. Pat Fitzgerald indicated on the Monday night when he helped recover her body, it didn’t appear to him she’d been in the water for two days. There were no obvious signs of injury or foul play, he said.

Mitchell recalls that Sunday was a hot day, and it stayed warm out until late. He can’t come up with a reason why the woman he calls his best friend didn’t just walk home after daylight.

“I don’t know what happened to her to cause her not to be able to get out,” Mitchell said. “Or if she had a stroke, or a seizure. Not that she had that history, I just don’t get it.”

Mitchell, a tow truck driver who came to know Thode through recovery, doesn’t think it odd if she went to the river by herself. Still, he said, he’s checked with a half dozen people she could possibly have been with, and they all said they weren’t.

“I called even my ex using friends,” he said.

Thode didn’t have enough money to get high enough to become delusional, he said. She had just $20, he said. And, he was told about that amount of methamphetamine was found in the car she had borrowed which was discovered parked on the east side of the river off Central Boulevard.

He tried to describe who she was, saying that even though she got high, drugs were not the center of her life.

He saw her often over the previous few months. Mitchell said she hadn’t been awake for days before that weekend, and she wasn’t the type of meth user to crash into a long, deep slumber after a high, according to Mitchell. “I’ve seen her sleep for four hours and be ready to go,” he said.

What is clear about Thode, is an extraordinary number of people turned out for not just one, or two, but three gatherings in her honor the week after her death.

“I’ve been to a lot of funerals, but I’ve never seen that many people at a funeral,” her father Roger Thode said.

He estimated there were 300 at the Napavine Assembly of God Church on Sunday Aug. 4, the same church where his daughter was baptized a year ago.

Two nights earlier, he and his wife Lila Thode were among two dozen individuals who came together beneath a picnic shelter in Fort Borst Park, comforting each other with song, prayer and fond recollections.

A couple years back, Tina Thode spent 10 months at a place called Safe Family Ministries on Jackson Highway south of Chehalis. It’s a year-long discipleship program primarily for women and children getting their lives back on track. Former residents recently began holding the Friday night park meetings so women who still struggle have a place to get encouragement, according to Kandi Delos Santos.

The Chehalis native was flamboyant with a contagious laugh, they said.

“She was always working, or she was directing, or she was just singing,” one young woman shared. “You could hear her singing for 40 yards down the hill,” added a man who said he volunteered at Safe.

Jen Jackson, whose voice and guitar led the evening music recalled Tina Thode as inspiring to many during her stay there.

“There were times I didn’t want to start until Tina was in the room, just because of the joy that radiated off of here,” she said.

Roger and Lila Thode showed again the day after the memorial service when Lewis County Drug Court members assembled in the county commissioner’s chambers at the Historic Courthouse in Chehalis honoring his daughter’s memory.

She was a current and active participant in drug court, according to drug court manager Jennifer Soper-Baker.

“A lot of the folks knew Tina pretty well, and they’re taking it pretty hard,” she said.

Soper-Baker called her a neat lady, who was very emotionally open and willing to do what was expected of her.

“She definitely tried many times to get clean over the course of the last three years,” she said.

Tina Thode had relapsed and spent a few days in jail as a sanction just before the fatal weekend, according to Soper-Baker. They spoke that Thursday afternoon, and Tina Thode was feeling optimistic and hopeful about her recovery, she said.

When she got out of the Lewis County Jail, she was set up to go into an inpatient drug treatment center in Chehalis, Mitchell said.

“I think it was Wednesday or Thursday, she had to be at ABHS by 10 p.m. the same night,” he said. “She made it there like at 11:30, but they still let her in.”

The following morning at around 11 o’clock, she called him and said she’d walked out, he said. He picked her up.

Her chosen drugs were meth and marijuana, he said. And she really wanted help to quit them, he said.

“She said she wanted to go back, but she didn’t want to be somewhere she could call someone and be home in five minutes,” Mitchell said.

On Saturday morning July 27, Mitchell was at Tina Thode’s apartment. He was helping her compose a letter to drug court, apologizing for walking out of treatment after they’d found her a bed, and asking to be able to go to an 90-day program in Spokane.

Mitchell said he had to go to work and their plan was to meet again about 5 p.m. to finish the letter. He spoke to her on the phone about 3 p.m., she said she was jumping in the shower.

“I talked to her about 4, when I called to tell her I had to work late,” he said.

Roger Thode went to the police department the following week to try to get some questions answered.

“She was gonna go put some more minutes on her phone, run some errands that day,” he said. “Instead, she went to the river.”

Born in Chehalis and mostly raised there, by her father and his current wife, Tina Thode alway loved spending time at the water, her father said.

“The Newaukum, that’s where you’d find her in the summer,” he said. “She would spend all day walking up and down the river, picking up agates

“She swam like a fish, even as a baby, water didn’t scare her.”

Roger Thode said his daughter has always had a battle, and her family has always tried to help her.

She didn’t work and was receiving disability benefits for mental issues, he said. Exactly what they were, he didn’t know.

“If she took her meds for her mental issue and left the drugs alone, she was a hard worker and worked hard,” he said.

At one job at a bakery in Yelm, the owner thought so much of her, he’d take off on vacation and leave her in charge,” her father said.

“She did good for quite some time,” he said. “But the meds, she couldn’t feel emotion. Didn’t laugh or cry; she got tired of that, doped up like a zombie.”

She decided having mental illness was better, he said.

Tina Thode tried to take her own life a year and a half ago, but survived, he said. After that, she worked closely with her doctors and got back on her medications and had the ten month stretch while she was at Safe where she did very well, he said.

She has three sons. The oldest lives in Everett with his father, the middle one is in the Army based in Alaska and her 12-year-old lives in Kelso with his father.

“We can’t hide the fact she was an addict,” Roger Thode said. “I was always afraid someday she’d be found dead in a ditch. I was hurt, but I wasn’t surprised.”

It was 10:21 p.m. on Saturday July 27, when the Lewis County emergency dispatch center got a 911 call from Tina Thode.

Centralia Police Department Sgt. Carl Buster on duty. He was told she went to the Skookumchuck River at the B Street Park, was cold, wet and needed help.

Buster knew her. He arrested her in May, an arrest that pushed her into drug court, he said.

On the way to jail they had a really good talk, he said. About life.

“It was like, hey Tina, when are you gonna get cleaned up?” Buster said. “She was like, I’m trying.”

Buster and two other officers responded, and before the night was over, they and four members of the fire department had searched along both sides of the river around the park – also known as Parkins Park, farther downstream along the levy at Sixth and Pearl Street and even father southwest near River Road.

Until her phone went dead, they communicated with her through a call taker and a dispatcher at the 911 center.

“We’re calling, telling her to yell, she’s singing at one point, but we can’t hear here,” Buster said.

The river is lined with thick blackberries and other brush, and in some places, the closest responders could get was like 20 yards, he said. Buster went in at B Street Park, crawling through bushes to get close to the riverbank.

“I’m hollering, ‘hey, it’s Buster’,” he said. “I’m thinking she’s scared. I know she knows me, I was there when she stabbed herself last year.”

We had so much working against us, he said.

Riverside Fire Authority Assistant Chief Mike Kytta now wonders about the various ways sound may have or have not have traveled along the course of the river.

They tried calling out to her, sounding a whistle and other means to make contact, he said.

“The deputy sounded his siren and she said she could hear it, but it sounded far away,” he said. “In fact, he was closer to her than anyone.”

Kytta and his crew walked with thermal imaging cameras, looking on the black and white screen for a heat signature that a person would have.

Her phone was “pinged” off a nearby cell tower.

They inquired about getting the state patrol aircraft with thermal imaging type capabilities, but it was not available.

Her father listened to the 911 tapes, and heard his daughter’s call.

At one point, she she didn’t want to wave her little flashlights or call out to the searchers as the 911 operator requested, saying she heard people on the bank but they hadn’t answered her when she did call out to them. At another point, she suggested she should sing, and let loose with multiple verses of Amazing Grace.

She told 911 she’d gone in the river at the park, and that she’d waded along the river. Roger Thode said he could hear that his daughter was a little spooked, but could tell she was not wasted.

“She could have been a little high, but not out-of-her-mind stupid,” he said. “It was Tina on there, and she wasn’t a mess.”

Police and fire personnel discussed getting a boat out onto the river, but it was dark and that would be too dangerous, according to Buster.

Although, he admitted, he even contemplated ignoring the fire department’s position on that and going out alone. He didn’t.

While later another sergeant from the police department said the reason the search was called off was because authorities came across someone who had seen her and told them she was okay, that wasn’t the case, he was mistaken, according to Buster.

They’d done what they could, it was 2 a.m. and going to be getting light again by about 4:30 a.m., when she would have been able to see her way out, according to Buster.

“It was warm, so we knew she wasn’t in danger from the elements,” Buster said.

It didn’t occur to Buster the search should resume the next day, except in hindsight, he said. “It’s tragic; I am so sorry for her and her family,” he said.

“I know people want to make a story about it, that police let her down,” Buster said. “And I’ll shoulder that. I tried to find her and I didn’t.

“The way I feel about it, is my own personal feelings about it.”

Buster now knows that at one point he was within about 100 to 200 yards of her, he said. The place Tina Thode subsequently was found was north of the park, north of where they looked, according to Kytta.

It was east of a pasture at Reynolds and North Tower avenues.

Buster said when she was discovered, she was on her back in shallow water at the edge of the river. A chair and a couple bottles of water were found near her body.

“Even though she was under water when she was found, we know she didn’t drown,” he said. “The coroner said her lungs didn’t have water in them.”

Mitchell said he was told an educated guess by the coroner was she died around noon on the same day her body was recovered. What was going on between 2 a.m. on Sunday and whenever she died is just something he can’t figure out, he said.

And he wonders why she called police if she were simply lost, instead of calling him, he said. “I know 911 would have been a last resort for her,” Mitchell said. “She knew they would have taken her straight to jail, for her drug court (issue).”

“It’s a very big mystery,” he said. “Me, Roger, Lila, her grandmother, all, would like to know what happened. But as it sits right now, she’s gone.”

Her father says, after talking with police, he feels confident they did everything they could, yet still ponders if she were the mayor’s daughter, they maybe wouldn’t have called off the search.

But there’s no point in wondering, what if, he said.

He doesn’t hold a grudge. He doesn’t know what happened. And yet he still speaks as though regardless of the conclusion from the coroner, his grown daughter’s demise is still a consequence of her drug use.

“If some person could look at their life and see what happened to Tina could happen to me,” he said. “I could get wasted and not come home some day. If they could just think that through, it would help us.

“Make her count for something I guess, if somebody could learn from this.”

Centralia police detectives are conducting an investigation. The Lewis County Coroner’s Office said on July 31 that a determination about the cause and manner of  her death won’t be made until the results of toxicology tests come back. The tests can take eight to 10 weeks.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – A lawsuit has been filed against Morton General Hospital on behalf of an elderly woman who was discharged from its emergency room with two boxes of enemas and a misdiagnosis of constipation and died days later.

Gertrude Tibbetts was taken to the hospital with severe abdominal pain where she was given an injection of pain medication, and an X-ray and then released against her wishes a little more than an hour later.

“She was screaming in agony, stating ‘I can’t believe you are sending me home, you are killing me. No one survives pain like this’,” an attorney for her daughter states in court documents.

The visit to the East Lewis County public hospital was Feb. 26, 2010. Tibbetts, 96, was residing at a Morton nursing home so she and her daughter Jane E. Jones could spend more time together, the attorney wrote.

The attorney stated, when the nurse handed the boxes with enemas to the Heritage House representative, she asked why they couldn’t be administered at hospital. The nurse replied, the lawyer wrote, “What? Do you want a blow out in the van?” and three nurses burst out laughing while Tibbetts was screaming in the background.

The complaint filed in Lewis County Superior Court earlier this month for medical malpractice and wrongful death names the hospital, Dr. Thomas Calderon and three unknown nurses.

Tibbetts was brought back to the hospital the following day when the laxatives were ineffective and then transferred to Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia. There, doctors discovered she was suffering with peritonitis due to small bowel obstruction and perforation as well as kidney failure. She was given comfort measures and died Mar 2, 2010.

“For her age, Gertrude Tibbetts was a remarkable and strong woman who was cognitively bright, and full of life, personality and humor,” the Puyullap-based attorney Talis Abolins wrote.

Abolins alleges the hospital failed when it failed to admit her, and failed to provide appropriate evaluation and care.

“She suffered tremendous pain and suffering, humiliation and fear of her impending death in the hours and days that followed,” the attorney wrote.

Multiple messages left requesting comment from hospital administrators yesterday were unreturned. Attempts to reach Calderon were unsuccessful. The parties have 20 days to respond in court to the lawsuit.

Calderon was informally disciplined by the state Medical Quality Assurance Commission for his evaluation of the patient’s condition.

He agreed to two years of probation and to undertake extra education in exchange for the commission not continuing to pursue charges of incompetence, negligence or malpractice, according to documents filed with the state Department of Health.

The commission alleged that after ordering the shot of pain medication and an X-ray which was unrevealing, Calderon did not perform a subsequent examination of Tibbetts, according to the documents.

The stipulation agreement – signed March 11, 2011 – indicated he should be sanctioned at a level comparable to practicing below the standard of care, related to causing unnecessary pain, stating the failure may not have caused the death since early discovery may not have saved her life.

The doctor did not admit any of the commission’s allegations, but was cooperative, had no previous disciplinary action since being licensed in Washington in 1998 and was released from his probation this past March.

The allegations by the commission note the patient reported her pain level as 20 on a scale of one to 10, while nurses recorded it at 10; and at discharge, the patient described her pain as a seven or eight.

The lawsuit seek damages in an amount to “be proven at trial.”

Among the reimbursements sought are medical bills of about $6,800 from Morton General Hospital and almost $16,000 from Providence St. Peter Hospital.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

A 41-year-old Centralia man who uses a wheelchair has filed a claim against the city saying he was attacked and injured by police officers during an incident in a hallway outside his apartment door.

Trygve Nelson was followed into the building where he lives on the 200 block of West Reynolds Street by an officer who was attempting to talk with him regarding calls he had just rode his wheelchair in the middle of the road up North Pearl Street.

Nelson’s claim for damages notes his injuries, his multiple upcoming medical appointments and claims damages in the amount of $400,000. It doesn’t detail what he claims police did – only saying police wrongly attacked him – but a six-page police report from the Centralia Police Department goes into great detail.

Nelson writes the incident occurred on July 2; the police report states it occurred on June 30.

According to the police report, Officer Patricia Finch called for backup after a drunken, angry and cussing Nelson refused to give his name, and stood up from his wheelchair facing her – he is described as 6-feet 4-inches tall and weighing 230 pounds – prompting her to unsnap her Taser – before riding away from her, going inside and slamming his door.

When Sgt. Carl Buster arrived and knocked on the door four times with his flashlight, Nelson exited fast with his hands in the air and said, “What the f***,” according to police reports.

Buster states in his report that fearing he was about to be assaulted, he spun Nelson around and tried to secure him against the wall.

Finch’s and Buster’s reports tell how they tried to gain control of him and he resisted, until he was on the ground and cuffed with a roughly one inch long cut above his left eye. It left what Finch described as a small amount of blood on the floor.

As they walked outside, Nelson allegedly pulled away and grabbed at Buster’s hand, and Buster “escorted him to the ground” again, Finch wrote.

They put a leg restraint on him because he was flailing. He was yelling he had aids, was terminal and they should just kill him, the officers wrote.

This all occurred at an apartment complex owned and operated by Reliable Enterprises, an organization founded in the 1970s to assist individuals with developmental disabilities.

Nelson was bleeding profusely, and said he was on blood thinners as well as heart medication, according to the report.

At one point, he was apologetic, said he was sorry for being an A-hole and that he drank too much after 18 years of abstinence, the report states.

Nelson vomited, medics sedated him and put a tube down his throat.

He lists in his claim injuries to his head, shoulder and knee and notes he has appointments with specialists for spine, for hands and ankles and for blood, as well as his primary physician.

Nelson also claims he was denied medical care while in jail and denied access to his medications. The Lewis County Jail is run by the sheriff’s office, not the police department.

Nelson was at the emergency room for several hours, where a doctor ordered a chest X-ray and CT scan because he was unconscious, according to police.

He was cited for several misdemeanors: disorderly conduct, obstructing a law enforcement officer and resisting arrest. However, by the following morning he had allegedly pushed a hospital staff member who was attempting to discharge him, so he was booked into the Lewis County Jail for third-degree assault.

Centralia Police Department Chief Bob Berg said yesterday the police report was rather self-explanatory.

“Claims like this are routinely denied by our insurance carrier,” Berg stated in a written response. “Any comment beyond that would be inappropriate as potential litigation may arise from the incident.”

Updated at 9:55 p.m.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

The 39-year-old woman who suffered burns in a Vader house fire almost two weeks ago has died.

Jeannette Dunivan-Spain was put on life support last week at St. John Medical Center in Longview and two days later, she died, according to her mother Mary Dunivan.

“By Friday, she had no brain activity, they do not know what went wrong,” Dunivan said.

The mother of two boys and sister to three brothers lived in Vader all her life, although she was born in Longview. She was estranged from her husband and lived in a fifth-wheel trailer in the area, but had recently begun staying at her mother’s home west of town.

“She was May Day queen, a good ball player,” Mary Dunivan said. “She was very smart.”

The night of the fire, she stayed with an old friend, in his house on C Street that had no electricity or running water.

Firefighters called just before 1 a.m. on Aug. 15 found the one and half story structure fully engulfed in flames, which were spreading to the neighbor’s place. Dunivan-Spain told deputies who arrived that she ran outside after trying to knock down the flames from a tipped over candle.

“She said the candle caught her blanket on fire, she woke up she was on fire,” her mother said.

Cowlitz-Lewis Fire District 20 Chief Richard Underdahl said yesterday he learned of her death but travels a lot in his work and hasn’t had a chance yet to speak with investigators

“I know the sheriff’s office is doing a follow up investigation,” he said.

Underdahl said at the time he believed she suffered second-degree burns, but he never saw her because she was at the end of the street with deputies and he was fighting the fire.

Paramedics from Lewis County Medic 1 arrived and called for Life flight, he said. A helicopter wasn’t available because of the weather so she was transported to Providence Centralia Hospital, according to Underdahl.

Her burns were pretty bad, her mother said.

Dunivan said she’s still trying to make sense of what happened and why the Centralia hospital discharged her daughter that night instead of getting her to a burn center.

“She would be alive today, I believe, if that had happened,” she said.

Dunivan was stunned when the hospital said her daughter was being sent home, and that there was nothing more for them to do for her. “They wouldn’t even help me dress her,” she said.

“It was a couple hours after she got there,” she said. “I said, she should be given antibiotics, they said no, we gave her some cream, some pain pills and some bandages.”

Dunivan, who used to work as a certified nursing assistant, said her daughter had burns on her arms, her face and her legs. Her hair was singed, she said. The hospital said they were second-degree. “On her hand, looking at it now, it was probably third-degree,” she said.

The following day, a friend’s husband drove Dunivan-Spain to a hospital in Longview.

“We took her to St. John’s, they were flabbergasted Centralia had not done more,” Dunivan said.

They rewrapped her bandages, gave her antibiotics, pain medicine and more cream, she said.

Back at her mother’s home on Saturday, she seemed to be doing better. On Sunday she even went to the local cemetery with her husband to visit the graves of her father and little girl, her mother said.

“When I got home Monday evening, she was a mess,” Dunivan said. “She had chills, she was delirious. I don’t know what happened. She went bad pretty darn fast.”

An ambulance was called, but her daughter wanted her husband to drive her back to St. John Medical Center, and he did. And she never came home.

Dunivan-Spain began to improve on Tuesday, but by Wednesday, she’d had a heart attack, her gall bladder had an infection, her kidneys were failing and her lungs were in a bad way, her mother said.

The hospital had asked her daughter what kind of measures they should undertake, and her daughter told them do everything they could, she said.

“They put her on dialysis, they gave her everything they had to offer,” Dunivan said.

Her life support was disconnected on Friday.

“This is a tragic, tragic thing,” Dunivan said. “So many unanswered things we may never have answers for.”

Dunivan-Spain’s body was turned over to the Cowlitz County Coroner’s Office, who facilitated its transfer to the Lewis County Coroner’s Office. A detective with the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office is working with a fire investigator in the case.

Structure fires ending in death are infrequent in Lewis County.

Sheriff’s Office detective Sgt. Dusty Breen said the last he could recall was the fall of 2010 when a fire broke out in the home of 54-year-old Gary Ike on Nicholson Road north of Toledo.

And about four years ago, a man ended up dying from smoke inhalation when his house on Burnt Ridge Road in Onalaska burned, Breen said.

“He was in the process of moving out, there was no electricity and the house caught fire while he was sleeping,” Breen said. “He’d borrowed some candles.”

According to the sheriff’s office, their investigation is awaiting the results of an autopsy, as it’s not certain it was injuries from the fire that killed her.

A spokesperson for Providence Centralia Hospital couldn’t speak about the treatment given to Dunivan-Spain but said they are committed to the highest level of patient care.

“We take any complaint very seriously,” Chris Thomas said. “And we have a thorough investigative process that is conducted when we do receive a complaint.”

As Dunivan mourns, she’s feeling gratitude for the last couple of weeks before the fire having so much time with her daughter.

Dunivan-Spain had recently been laid off from her job at a gas station convenience store and had an appointment about drug treatment coming up, her mother said.

Yes, she had a drug problem – everyone in Vader does, her mother said. But she wasn’t a typical Vaderite, she said.

Her daughter was the kind of person who never spoke poorly of others, she said.

“She never lost her innocence, she never harmed anyone, but herself,” she said.

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A memorial service for Jeannette Dunivan-Spain will be held on Saturday at 2 o’clock in the afternoon at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 122 Henriott Road, Toledo, Wash.

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For background, read “Vader house fire injures one” from Thursday August 15, 2013, here