A tragic blaze claimed the life of Julie Whetstone, 51, after her tent—a yurt, specifically—caught fire in the small town of Townsend, as reported by the Blount County Sheriff's Office. According to a WVLT article, the incident occurred last Monday with deputies arriving at the scene to find the fire department providing aid to Whetstone, who had already sustained severe burns on her upper body.
The subsequent investigation revealed, through an eyewitness account compiled in a WBIR report, that a mother driving her son to his girlfriend's house came upon the scene where they witnessed Whetstone emerging from her tent engulfed in flames; her son, in a frantic attempt to assist, tried unsuccessfully to encourage Whetstone to roll on the ground to extinguish the fire and eventually resorted to smothering the flames with a blanket retrieved from his girlfriend's camper.
More information surfaced about the events leading up to the fire, as Whetstone's daughter—who had been with her earlier that evening—told the Blount County Sheriff's deputies that her mother had been attempting to rekindle the flame in her wood-burning stove using a leaky can filled with kerosene, the yurt also contained several propane heaters, according to an account in a WATE news report; the daughter had also mentioned that she had set up a propane heater for her mother before departing and revealed her mother had been consuming alcohol that evening.
After the local first responders' attempts to save her, Whetstone was transported to the Townsend Post Office from where she was airlifted to the University of Tennessee Medical Center, it was in the hospital that she succumbed to her injuries the following morning, as confirmed by the sheriff's office.
