Brothers among more than 30 left homeless after northwest Las Vegas apartment fire

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – More than 30 residents over the Labor Day weekend were left homeless after a fire tore through several apartments.

It happened on Sunday afternoon at Bella Solara Apartments located near Smoke Ranch Road and Tenaya, and several residents told 8 News Now they didn’t hear fire alarms.

Brothers Joshua, 24, and Noah Vekslin, 23, were leaving the Mirabelli Community Center on Monday, less than a day after a fire destroyed their home.

“We gotta think positively, we can’t look at the negatives. We got to keep moving, that’s basically our mindset right now,” Joshua Vekslin said. “So the only people that stayed at the shelter was me and my brother, which is why we are actually leaving today. They can’t set this whole operation up just for two of us.”

The Red Cross of Southern Nevada converted that space into an emergency shelter for the 36 residents who were displaced by the fire.

“Once I came from work, I went in there to grab the main stuff,” Joshua said. “The only thing that we had that was really working was our air fryer.”

Noah was home at the time of the fire.

“I see a bunch of smoke coming out of an apartment building, and then next you know it was – boom. It was like a straight movie scene like the fire just went through the window. It was insane,” Noah said.

He said he didn’t hear fire alarms go off.

“Ours didn’t go off at all. You know, a lot of people’s weren’t going off. They were kind of just relaxing when I was going down knocking and getting people out of there,” Noah said. “It could’ve been very dangerous, potentially.”

That was echoed by another neighbor who returned to his apartment on Monday to retrieve his things.

“So the building fire alarm did not work like it was supposed to,” a resident, who asked to be anonymous said.

Luckily, he said he had renter’s insurance.

The three residents 8 News Now spoke to said they don’t know if they’ll ever return to Bella Solara Apartments.

According to Las Vegas Fire & Rescue, a cause hasn’t been determined and it remained under investigation as of Monday.

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