San Jose dog salon owner, staff flee building blaze with four bulldogs and a Maltese

Mario Rodriguez was in a storage unit behind his dog-grooming salon in San Jose and his three English bulldogs were barking like they were scared so he walked outside and saw fire and black smoke billowing from the building next door, a structure inches from his salon and full of “mountains of random stuff,” he said.

“The whole building just immediately ignited,” said Rodriguez, 25. “The whole building was just a lot of things just piled together over the years. You don’t know what’s going to happen, if something next door is going to explode.”

He bolted into his salon, he said. “There were two groomers, with one dog each,” said Rodriguez, 25, who opened the salon, Unity Bulldogs, in October.

Rodriguez told the groomers there was a fire and to get their dogs — a French bulldog and a Maltese — and meet him outside, he said. “They got them off the table, on the leash, and they were outside the door within seconds,” Rodriguez said.

Fire trucks were starting to stream in with sirens wailing and police were pulling into the area. Rodriguez ran back to get his own dogs from the storage unit, putting Drago and Queen on a double leash and grabbing Paris, “my smallest one,” in one arm.

The woman with the wig shop next door took the bulldogs for him while Rodriguez called a family member to come get them. The groomers fled down the street with Frenchie and the Maltese, calling the dogs’ owners as they hurried away from the fire, to tell them their pets were safe, and to arrange for pickup, Rodriguez said.

“By the time we got in touch with the pet parents, the roads were closed,” he said. The groomers took the dogs a few streets away and each “delivered their doggy back to the owner,” he said.

San Jose fire officials said Wednesday night that the two-alarm fire in the 900 block of Park Avenue, in the Sunol-Midtown neighborhood about a mile southwest of downtown, was called in just after 3 p.m. and brought under control just after 6 p.m. by five dozen firefighters who confined it to the one-story corner building where it started. The structure, described by fire officials as a “vacant commercial building that had unknown stored items,” suffered severe damage including a collapsed roof. The site would be monitored throughout the night to douse hotspots and prevent rekindling, said San Jose Fire Department Capt. Luis Alanis.

No injuries were reported.

Rodriguez, of San Jose, said the building that burned, whose wall ran inches from the wall of the smaller two-story blue building where he rents salon space, was filled with clothes, toys, furniture. “It was a big mess,” he said, “all flammable stuff.”

Earlier on the day of the fire, he said, he noticed what appeared to be signs that someone had broken in: an unsecured entrance and fresh graffiti, he said. “There was no maintenance to that building. It had gotten broken into before,” he said.