John Lytle made a terrible discovery when he went to check on his mother-in-law last Friday, Sept. 26.
He found Dorothy "Dot" Tarrant, 84, lying on the kitchen floor of her condominium at 57 Union St., and she wasn’t breathing. It appeared she had a sunburn on her back, and a large portion of her light-blue robe was charred and submerged in water in the sink, Lytle told The Times.
On the stove, he found a saucepan with coffee in it, sitting above a burner that was shut off.
Early this week, the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office said Tarrant’s death was accidental, according to the preliminary findings of its investigation, said Paul Loriquet, a spokesman for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.
The medical examiner pinpointed the causes of her death as heart disease, hypertension and thermal burns, Loriquet said. Toxicology reports are still pending.
Lytle said that, before he went to Tarrant’s dwelling unit, located on the second floor of a seven-story building, he tried calling her several times last Friday morning to schedule a time when he would take her to pick up a new pair of glasses.
As he drove back to Montclair from Rutherford, he called Tarrant three times. When she didn’t pick up during the first two calls, he figured she might be showering, or that she might not have gotten to the phone in time, since lately she had been having difficulty walking.
Since the spring, Tarrant’s health had been declining. She had been hospitalized after her ankles had swelled up and then became "a lot less active," as she was less comfortable walking outside, Lytle said.
Following the third phone call, Lytle let the phone ring more than a dozen times — "I made a point of counting" — to make certain the anxiety that was starting to creep up on him wasn’t an overreaction, he said. When she still didn’t pick up, he decided to stop in to see her.
After finding her body, Lytle called 9-1-1. According to Fire Chief Kevin Allen, firefighters arrived at about 1 p.m. and encountered "a mist" of smoke in the dwelling, but no flames, and they noticed a small amount of fire damage to the doors of some kitchen cabinets. Lytle said the kitchen’s linoleum floor had been singed, as well.
Allen said the fire seemed to have gone out "a while before we got there." As investigators interviewed witnesses and gathered evidence, a mover who had been hired to move another resident out of the building told Lytle that he had smelled smoke at 9:30 that morning, three hours before Lytle had gotten to Tarrant’s home.
Authorities are still examining whether Tarrant’s smoke alarm was working properly, whether it was tied into some sort of monitoring system and, if it was, whether the system received a signal indicating there was a smoke condition in the condominium, Loriquet said.
Lytle remembered her as someone who always put other people’s interests ahead of her own.
His wife and Tarrant’s daughter, Patricia Lytle, said her mother was full of energy even in her later years. She would still rearrange the furniture in her condo without assistance while in her 80s, and in her 70s she continued playing tennis and driving regularly by herself to and from Westport, Conn., where she had resided for almost half a century with her late husband, the author John "Jack" Tarrant. The couple co-wrote a book about Westport, an artistic and politically liberal community similar to Montclair, and Weston, Conn., titled, "A Community of Artists."
The Lytles’ two daughters, Bonnie, who is in seventh grade, and Jade, a first grader, had close relationships with their grandmother. Last academic year, Jade spent three or four days after school each week at Dorothy Tarrant’s place, where her grandmother would read stories to her and participate in Jade’s tea parties.
Tarrant, a native of New York City, was a Navy veteran who served as a pharmacist’s mate, the equivalent of an Army medic, from 1945 to 1946. In Westport, she volunteered with the Westport Community Council, a social services agency, and eventually became its executive director before retiring.
Her husband died in 1996, and Tarrant moved to Montclair seven years later, where she joined the Montclair Women’s Club. Upon her death she was living alone at 57 Union St.
A memorial service for Tarrant will be held at 2 p.m. tomorrow, Friday, Oct. 3, at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair on Church Street.
