The last thing Patrick Meguid remembers from Oct. 4 is retreating back into his hostel room after attempting to escape through an exit blackened with smoke.
The sharp ring of a fire alarm had woken him up shortly after 2 a.m.
“I told myself, ‘I’m going to have to move quickly,’ and that’s the last thing I can recall before I passed out,” Meguid said in a recent interview.
He was one of two people rescued by Montreal firefighters when a fire broke out at the three-storey, 100-year-old building on Notre-Dame Street in Old Montreal where Meguid was renting a room. Twenty-one other people inside the building were able to make their way out on their own.
But a French mother and her daughter did not make it. Léonor Geraudie, 43, and seven-year-old Vérane Reynaud-Geraudie, whom Meguid had just met, died in the fire that night.
The building is owned by Émile-Haim Benamor, who also owned the building on Place D’Youville in Old Montreal where seven people died in a fire in March 2023. Benamor was sharply criticized for the windowless rooms used for short-term rentals in that building.
Both fires were deliberately set, say police, who have made arrests in both cases.
The motives remain unclear. After the second deadly fire, gunshots were reported outside Benamor’s office and his car was set on fire outside his home.
A restaurant and a hostel were operating in the building on Notre-Dame Street and have other people listed as their owners.
Some comments on booking websites describe the hostel, Le 402, as cramped and rundown. Multiple reviewers also reported bedrooms without windows, or windows that wouldn’t open.
The day after the fire, Martin Guilbault, a division chief with the Montreal fire department, said despite talk about the lack of windows in bedrooms, “it was not an issue” for hotels.
“In terms of fire safety, a window is not considered a means of escape,” he told reporters.
Meguid believes those guidelines should change. He says he was lucky enough to have ended up with the biggest suite in the building, which had a window, and that that’s how firefighters were able to rescue him.
By the time they arrived, he’d inhaled so much smoke that soot coated his lungs and bronchial tubes.
“It was as if I was drowning,” Meguid said.
When he got to the hospital, he was put in a coma that ended up lasting eight days. He woke up on Oct. 12 and was tied to his bed for about another week because of psychosis symptoms he experienced from the effects of the powerful drugs doctors had used to induce the coma. In all, Meguid spent 20 days in hospital.
Meguid doesn’t have any burns and his lungs are starting to heal, but he’s been struggling with the psychological after-effects. He has insomnia and says he holds a grudge against those in charge of the building’s short-term rentals for not making it easier to escape.
“There was no way to leave except for the fire escape” that was covered in smoke, he said.
Meguid had rented the room for three nights while his girlfriend stayed at their studio apartment with her mother.
Thomas Sawer, a German tourist on his first trip to Canada, had also rented a room inside the building at 402 Notre-Dame St. that night.
Sawer was among those able to make it out of the building on foot. He ended up in one of the rooms without a window and had decided not to stay more than one night, packing his things to get out first thing in the morning.
He, too, has trouble sleeping and experiences flashbacks from the fire.
“During the day, I’m tired and during the night, I’m awake,” Sawer said from his home in Germany.
After a second deadly fire in tourist accommodations in Old Montreal, questions are being asked about what the city’s housing regulations actually require to keep residents and visitors safe.
And Sawer, too, wonders what more could have been done to prevent two tragedies from occurring within a year-and-a-half at two buildings owned by the same person, both with short-term rentals lacking windows.
“I’m mixed between helpless, disappointed and angry because I think it could have been prevented,” said Sawer.
Meguid says he doesn’t know yet whether he’ll pursue legal action against the owners of the hostel, but says that for now he’s just counting his blessings.
“I am in a state of grace in the sense that it is a miracle that I’m alive,” he said.
