Staff photo / Ed Runyan This is the house on North Maryland Avenue that caught fire early Sunday, resulting in a 5-year-old boy being killed and his mother and five siblings being displaced.

YOUNGSTOWN — The cause of the early Sunday house fire on North Maryland Avenue that killed a 5-year-old boy is still under investigation, but fire Chief Barry Finley urged the public to avoid using space heaters as a sole heat source.

“From my understanding there was no heat in the house,” the chief said at a news conference with Mayor Jamael Tito Brown at the main fire station downtown. “They were using space heaters to heat the entire house.”

He said space heaters are “good if you use them for what they are designed for,” but “when you start looking at the older houses in Youngstown and all of the space heaters you might have, you have to understand that a space heater draws a lot of amperage from the electric. That can overheat a circuit in no time at all.”

He said officials “don’t know in fact it’s what caused the fire, but I’d be certain that contributed to it. So I want everybody, everybody in this city and everywhere else when you use these appliances, use them as they are designed to be used. But space heaters should not be used to heat an entire house.”

Finley said five of the boy’s siblings made it out of the home OK, but their mother is still in the hospital recovering from physical injuries she suffered from jumping from a second-floor porch.

Firefighters found the boy in a closet — where he apparently was hiding — about 10 minutes after firefighters arrived, Finley said, noting that losing anyone in a fire is hard on firefighters.

“Even though we are firefighters and do this all the time, when we lose anyone, it doesn’t matter, anyone on our watch, it hits us all hard. As the mayor said, our prayers go out to the family as a whole,” Finley said.

He said the boy’s mother suffered injuries when she jumped, and she is going to need help emotionally and otherwise because she probably will not be able to return to that home.

“There’s too much structural damage, too much fire damage. The mom is going to be in need of a whole lot of support and prayers,” Finley said.

The State Fire Marshal’s Office is handling the investigation into the cause of the fire, but the investigator assigned to the case is Kurt Wright, a recently retired Youngstown fire investigator, Finley said.

Jarrod Clay, public information officer for the State Fire Marshal’s Office, responded to a request for information by stating that “At the time of the fire there were six juveniles and one adult female residing at the home.

A 5-year-old male was pronounced deceased at (St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital). The remaining occupants were all examined at (the hospital), with the adult being admitted for injuries sustained while escaping the fire.”

Most of the children in the home were less than 10 years old, Finley told reporters.

Clay noted that Youngstown fire crews “arrived with heavy fire throughout the home and made entry for extinguishment and search-and-rescue operations.” He said the fire “remains under investigation.”

A Youngstown police report states that officers were notified of the fire at 5:58 a.m. Two police officers assisted firefighters and provided crowd control.

Finley said he has a “young” fire department, and they have “never seen anything like this.”

There will be an After Action Review of the fire call that is expected to include remarks to remind the firefighters that, “You are human. It’s not natural to see what we see, but there are people out there to help us through this,” Finley said.

Brown said he thanks the American Red Cross for the assistance being provided to the family.