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The Hatfield Volunteer Fire Company was called to the home, 2873 Washington Lane, at about 4:20 a.m., they wrote in a release Friday afternoon. Dispatchers advised that the blaze on the first floor had trapped two people upstairs, the Company said.
Firefighters arrived within minutes to find "heavy fire conditions" on the house's front side, with only three of the five residents having escaped, the release says. They were able to quickly extinguish "the bulk" of the fire on the ground level and made their way upstairs, the Company wrote.
A man and a woman were removed from a second-floor bedroom — "one taken down the stairs and the other out a window and down a ladder," firefighters said.
The female victim, 63-year-old Leenabahen Patel, was pronounced dead at the scene, a Montgomery County Coroner's Office spokesperson told Daily Voice. The man, 78-year-old Ghanshyam Patel, was pronounced dead at Abington Lansdale Hospital, the spokesman said.
Their causes and manners of death are pending the results of the fire investigation and toxicology reports, the Coroner's Office said. The victims' relationship to one another was not immediately clear.
A third victim, identified by Hatfield fire officials as an adult man, was taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest with burn injuries, but his condition was unknown to the Company as of Friday afternoon.
Investigators remained on the scene throughout the morning to determine the "cause and source" of the fire, Hatfield officials said. No determination had been made by Friday afternoon.
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