Mom, son perish in blaze early Saturday

A family member said a 38-year-old man died a hero when he ran back into his burning home to try and save his mother and instead perished with her while shielding her from the flames.”He had come out and they were trying to get [the mother] out, and they found him on top of the mother,” Anne Buxton, the sister-in-law and aunt of the deceased said by phone from Marblehead on Sunday. “He was a hero, he certainly was.”Norma Morse, 69, and her son Laurence Morse Jr., 38, died when a fire started at 15 McKinley Terrace at approximately 5:30 a.m. Saturday, Buxton said.She said that Norma Morse was just recovering from hip surgery and couldn’t get down the stairs. Laurence Morse Jr., – or “Little Larry”; he didn’t like being called Junior so they called him Little Larry when he was a child – made it safely outside. But he ran back in to get his mother, to whom Buxton said Larry Morse “was devoted.””It was sad,” she said.Arthur Brown, who lives directly across the street at 18 McKinley Terrace, noticed the fire at about 5:30 a.m. burning on a porch of the two-story home and rushed to help get the occupants out.As he called 911, he said he banged on the front door of the home.”A daughter answered the door and she ran back in to try and get everyone out,” Brown said.When firefighters arrived on the scene a few minutes later, the entire roof and much of the left side of the home was engulfed in flames, said Lynn Fire Chief Dennis Carmody and State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan in a press conference outside the home Saturday morning.Carmody said firefighters tried to put out the “extensive” fire for more than an hour. He said teams of firefighters rushed into the house in turns because of the heavy smoke and flames.Coan confirmed that two people died in the fire and Carmody said firefighters found them on the second floor, close to one another.Laurence Morse’s brother, Jason Morse, was visiting the family from his home in New Hampshire and escaped the fire, according to Kerri Menard, who lived on McKinley Terrace for 28 years and knows the Morse family. Menard said their sister, Paula Morse, and her two teenaged children also escaped the fire.Coan confirmed that a woman and her two children escaped the home from the basement only to be trapped in the backyard by flames.Neighbor Cheryl Appleton, who lives at 13 McKinley Terrace, said firefighters used axes to break down a wooden fence separating her home and the house on fire so the woman and her two teenaged children were able to escape to the street.”Eventually they crawled through the side of house,” she said.Cheryl Appleton, who also lives at 13 McKinley Terrace, said fire crews evacuated her family, fearing the fire would spread to other houses.In a morning still dark, she and her family watched firefighters battle what she described as a stubborn blaze.”They kept trying and trying to put it out; it wouldn’t go out. We thought our house was going to catch fire,” she said.Menard, the longtime neighbor and family friend, said 15 McKinley Terrace was a home that had been in the Morse family for at least a generation. “They were a good family. They kept to themselves,” Menard said. Menard said Laurence Morse, whom she called Larry, was a quiet man who drove a large red truck.”He tried to save her,” she said of his mother. “He’s a big guy, too, he could have.”Buxton said the home was her father’s and then passed to her late brother Laurence and Norma after her father died 22 years ago. Laurence and Norma lived there with their three children, Buxton said. She said the family drifted apart after Laurence Sr. died, but she had some fond memories of both her sister-in-law and her nephew, who was a metal worker like his father.Coan said fire officials are investigating the cause of the fire. He said there was a smoke alarm on the second floor of the home but that fire officials aren’t sure if it went off.”It’s a tragedy, I wouldn’t wish that on nobody,” Buxton said, noting that she too had a fire