Peter Reitz woke up at 3 a.m. last week to his roommate screaming, “Fire!”

He looked out his second story window to see flames roaring across his front porch, then ran down the hall to pound on the locked door of his other roommate, Randy Singer, a teaching assistant for the Odum School of Ecology, who wouldn’t wake up.

“That’s when the fire burst through the front door,” Reitz said. “I needed to just get out.”

Reitz remembers very little of his mad dash down the stairs and outside to join his two roommates standing below Singer’s second-story window.

With glass exploding and power lines sparking, Reitz called to Singer, who finally woke and opened his door to escape, getting a blast of heat and smoke.

“That’s when he goes to open the window, but it’s nailed shut,” Reitz said.

Singer broke open the window and attempted to climb to safety.

“As he was hanging, the fire burst into his room. He had to let go when his hands got so hot he couldn’t hold on anymore. That’s when we heard a, ‘Thump, Ah!’”

During the fall, Singer broke his arm near the elbow on an air conditioning unit. Reitz and his other roommates helped him to safety as the fire fighters arrived.

The blaze wasn’t cleared for more than seven hours, according to fire department reports. It caused $84,000 of damage to the house the four uninsured University alumni were renting and $25,000 to the contents of the house.

“I didn’t start to cry until the fire marshal came over and asked us if we had any pets,” Reitz said. That’s when he realized his pet rat, Lady Starfire, had been trapped in the house and eventually died in the house.

Documents did not reveal the cause of the fire, and Reitz said it is still under investigation.

Despite the fire, Reitz has remained positive.

“We’ve been lucky in a lot of ways,” he said. “I had my car in the backyard, and it’s completely fine.”

Reitz added, “But my car keys were in the house, and they completely melted.”

Reitz said his week was nowhere near as bad as roommate Jack Methe’s.

“Jack lost his job the same day the house burned down,” Reitz said with a smile. “I told him, ‘At least you weren’t dating someone and she broke up with you.’”

Reitz, a recent University graduate and now a ninth grade English teacher at Commerce City High School, said he is often reminded of everything he lost but doesn’t think it will sink in until his life settles down.

“I had every paper I’d written since high school,” Reitz said, shaking his head. He was most upset about losing his books. “I had almost 200 books.”

Reitz said before the fire, a professor told him about a Web site for users to list books and write reviews.

“I had been so excited about it I entered all my books in.” He said it was nice to have the list to rebuild his library, but still, “It’s a reminder of how much I lost.”

Regardless, Reitz refuses to let his problems get him down. He said this week he planned to return to teaching English and taking aerial dance trapeze classes at Athens’ Canopy Studio.

“It’ll be nice to release some of the stress.”

Quick to smile, laugh and joke, Reitz said with a grin, “I personally feel like I’ve been exceptionally lucky.”