A lawsuit filed Tuesday, July 7, over a fatal fire at a Fayette group home alleges the building lacked basic fire safety protections that could have saved a resident’s life, ABC17 reports.
Siblings Connie Mallick and Robert Bittle are suing Linda Perkins Home, Inc. over the death of their brother, Donald Bittle, a fully disabled resident who died of smoke inhalation in the January 2026 fire; two other people, another resident and an employee, also died. The lawsuit claims the upper level where Bittle’s room was located had no working smoke detectors, that the building was constructed without required fire barriers between foam insulation and interior walls — which the suit says let the fire spread quickly — and that there was no interior stairway, leaving what the suit describes as “upper-level residents with no interior path of egress to safety.”
The state fire marshal’s office investigated and, as of a March 2026 report, listed the fire’s cause as undetermined. The Department of Mental Health had certified the facility in 2024 with no fire-safety concerns noted at that time. Linda Perkins Home, Inc. had not publicly responded to the allegations as of ABC17’s report.
Why it matters here: these are allegations in a civil suit, not a court finding, and worth reading that way. But group homes like this one exist in nearly every small Missouri county, including ours, and a case like this is reason enough for any family with a loved one in assisted care nearby to ask their own facility pointed questions about smoke detectors and exits.