They had lived in the same house at 8.5-Mile Zimovia Highway since 2019, with Tim and Shei Gillen renting the downstairs apartment from homeowner Bruce Levine. All three lost their home and just about everything they owned in a fire Monday afternoon, April 27.

Levine also lost his two dogs, and the Gillens lost two cats in the fire but were able to save their three dogs. They buried the cats last week.

Levine suffered burns on his hands and face and was hospitalized a couple of days; he was released April 29. The Gillens were not injured.

“Bruce is like family to us,” Shei Gillen said. “He walked me down the aisle” in her September 2019 wedding in Oregon, and the couple moved into the ground-floor apartment in Levine’s house two months later, she said.

The Gillens were able to save some charred photo albums. “We tried to save what we could.”

Levine lost everything, except for his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which was in a separate garage. He credited the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department with pouring water on the garage to keep it from catching fire too.

His two dogs died in the fire. Bubba was a 170-pound mix of mastiff, rottweiler and pitbull. Gabby was a rottweiler. Both were rescue dogs, he said, Gabby from Prince of Wales Island and Bubba from Anchorage.

Though he tried to enter the home to save his dogs — knocking the back door off its hinges with his shoulder — he was blocked by the smoke and heat.

“I would not have been able to live with myself if I didn’t try to save my dogs.”

Levine was not home when the fire started. When he got home after his workday at the high school was over, he saw first responders’ vehicles and ran up the stairs, hoping to rescue his dogs.

Though he suffered burns in his rescue attempt, “the fire didn’t burn me, it was the heat that burned me.”

Unable to come back down the stairs, he climbed down to the ground on a ladder the fire department had set in place.

He said the house was insured. “It will be rebuilt.” The rebuilding schedule “is all up to the insurance company.”

Levine has use of a two-bedroom trailer at the Nugget Trailer Court, where he can stay as long as he needs, he said.

It was more than a wood-frame house to Levine. He got married on the deck of the house. His wife, Hollie, passed away in October 2025.

Levine had come to Wrangell in 2006 on a vacation from his home in Napa Valley, California, and decided to stay.

He has been working this past year as a paraprofessional at the high school. Although he will not return to the job in the final weeks of the school year, he plans to return in August.

“I love what I do,” he said. “It is so healing to be working with these young people.”

Shei Gillen was home when the fire started, watching TV and napping after her early morning shift cleaning at the hospital.

“I’m not exactly sure what started it,” she said of the blaze that severely damaged the structure.

The fire department has not announced what started the blaze.

Fire Chief Jordan Buness said U.S. Forest Service personnel spotted the fire while driving by and alerted the downstairs tenants, who were able to escape with their dogs.

The Gillens have found temporary housing at the Ketchikan Ready-Mix bunkhouse just past the golf course. “It’s a roof over our heads,” said Shei Gillen, who returned to her job two days after the fire.

“I’ve got an angel on my shoulder,” she said.

She was injured in a car accident in Wasilla on Christmas Eve 2011. “We spent Christmas morning in the hospital.”

The Gillens are undecided whether to stay in Wrangell, she said, adding that it may depend on finding housing that allows dogs. They have grandkids in Spokane, Washington.

She said multiple people have offered assistance after the fire. “I’m thankful for the community.”

GoFundMe accounts have been set up for both Levine and the Gillens.

The call came into the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department at 3:37 p.m. on April 27, with the first engine and five firefighters on their way from the station three minutes later, according to the department’s statement on Facebook.

Upon arriving, the crews found the second floor and loft on fire, with “significant roof compromise.”

They found Levine trapped by the fire on the porch, after he tried to enter the home to save his dogs.

“Firefighters, working in coordination with a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer and a civilian bystander, successfully deployed ladders” to rescue Levine from the porch.

In total, the fire department responded with three fire engines, a water tanker, squad van and two ambulances.

The Alaska Department of Transportation’s Wrangell crew responded with its airport firefighting unit, and the borough’s Public Works Department shuttled water to the site, which is past the end of municipal water lines.

“When you get off of the hydrant system, you start having to do what we call ‘shuttle water,’” Buness told KSTK radio.

While fighting the flames, crews were able to disconnect a household-sized propane tank and move it away from the fire, he said.

The home is about 2,000 square feet and is uninhabitable, Buness said.