Cassidy Fae Pendley was eighteen. Lauren Astrid Kristiana Mahon was eighteen. Justin Michael Anderson was nineteen. Travis Lane Cale was nineteen. Allison Walden was nineteen. William Rhea was eighteen. Emily Lauren Yelton was nineteen and a student at Clemson. All seven died of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning, in their beds, on the second floor. North Carolina's Chief Medical Examiner Dr. John Butts told the Associated Press that there was no evidence of any other injuries. A parent later relayed what a medical examiner in Chapel Hill had explained to him: that carbon monoxide comes first, before the smoke, and that the seven would have taken only a few breaths of it before slipping out of consciousness. They died, the examiner said, in their sleep. It is the small mercy that families looking for one have to hold.

Five students on the first floor escaped through doors. A sixth, Tripp Wylie, a twenty-year-old USC sophomore on the upper floor, jumped from a third-story window into the canal beside the house. He had known Travis Cale and Justin Anderson and Emily Yelton since grammar school. They were, he later told Matt Lauer on the Today Show, his best friends. Andrew Rhea, nineteen, made it out of the house. His younger brother William did not. Fire Chief Robert Yoho told reporters that survival came down to where each student happened to be when the alarms woke them. The fire had been burning on the back deck for as much as twenty minutes before anyone called 911, by which time, fed by wind, it had raced up through the soffits - the underside of the eaves - and into the attic above the second floor. When the first engines arrived four minutes after the call, the house was already fully involved. Firefighters tried to enter and could not.

The house had working smoke detectors, and they did what smoke detectors do. They woke up the students who were close enough to a door to use the warning. What the house did not have was a sprinkler system or a monitored alarm that would automatically call the fire department. Neither was required for a single-family vacation rental under North Carolina building code or local law, even for a three-story beach house frequently used by large groups of guests who did not know the layout. The cause of the fire was never firmly determined. Investigators ruled out arson, ruled out the grill and the outdoor fireplace, and concluded only that the fire began on the back deck. Survivors told the State Bureau of Investigation that some of the students had been smoking cigarettes earlier in the evening. Improperly discarded smoking materials could not be ruled out as the ignition source, but neither could anything else, and the deck was too thoroughly destroyed to read. What the fire investigators did focus on, in the weeks afterward, was how the flames had moved once they started. The vinyl soffit material on the eaves had melted away under heat, opening a chimney for fire to race up the outside of the house and into the attic space. Twelve days earlier, a fire in Raleigh had destroyed thirty-eight townhomes the same way.

Eleven months later, in September 2008, many of the survivors and several of the victims' mothers traveled to Washington, D.C. to advocate for changes in the codes. They asked Congress to push residential sprinkler systems into the model building codes that most states adopt. They asked for monitored alarm systems in vacation rentals frequented by transient guests. They asked schools to teach fire safety more seriously than they had been taught it. "Every student should know how to react if caught in a blaze like the fire at Ocean Isle Beach," they said. Tripp Wylie, ten months out from jumping into a canal at dawn, told a reporter from WIS-TV: "It should not have to come down to luck." The International Residential Code did eventually move toward requiring residential sprinkler systems, though state-by-state adoption has been uneven. North Carolina has continued to debate it. The house on Scotland Street has long since been demolished. Memorial services were held in three states. At Ocean Isle Beach a small group of residents built an aluminum cross and surrounded it with seven smaller ones, one for each of the students. People left flowers and stuffed animals and personal notes. Cassidy Pendley. Lauren Mahon. Justin Anderson. Travis Cale. Allison Walden. William Rhea. Emily Yelton. They were going to be, between them, doctors and teachers and engineers and parents. They had a long weekend at the beach instead.