The state fire marshal has identified the victims in a two-story house fire in Harford County that killed five of the seven residents, but investigation into the cause of the fire continues.

Deputies from the county sheriff’s office pulled the house’s owner, 72-year-old Jerome Shropshire, from just inside a door on the first floor around 10:30 a.m. Thursday, but he died soon after arriving at Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air.

Investigators searching the house later found Shropshire’s wife, Annette Milford Shropshire, 47, and three grandchildren, 4-year-old Donald White, 3-year-old Derek White and 8-month-old Jhaniyah Davis.

Six-year-old Iyana Horne was in school at the time of the fire, and the children’s mother, 22-year-old Schunette Shropshire, was attending college classes.

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“Just pulling up in front, you could feel the heat through the car,” said Deputy First Class Robert Burgess, who arrived with Cpl. Tom Rumbaugh only a minute after the first call. Multiple neighbors and a passing garbage truck driver had reported the fire when they saw it on the outside of the house, Deputy State Fire Marshal W. Faron Taylor said.

The second floor was in flames when the deputies arrived, and a neighbor told them she heard screaming from that floor, Burgess said.

After Rumbaugh could not force the front door open, the deputies went around to a back door, where an unidentified man at the scene assisted them by kicking the door in. Authorities soon lost track of him amid the chaos of the blaze — which Burgess described as heavy smoke, crackling flames and firecracker-like blasts from the house’s electrical system as it burned.

After pulling Shropshire from the house and finding the smoke too thick to go any farther, the deputies let firefighters take over rather than risk becoming casualties themselves.

“One of the worst parts was standing there in the street when [the children’s] mom came up in a full sprint toward the house,” Burgess said. “We just had to grab her up in a big hug and take her over to an ambulance.”

The level of carbon monoxide the state medical examiner found in the victims’ remains suggested that they succumbed to smoke inhalation and lost consciousness well before the flames ever reached them, Taylor said. The fire could have been burning and filling the house with toxic gases and smoke for some time before it was visible from outside and 911 was called, he said.

The only smoke detector found in the house was still sitting in its package, unopened, Taylor said.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com