Police say home's heater was found to measure 1,000 degrees where elderly couple was found dead

An elderly couple was found dead inside their South Carolina home and police say that the heater was measured to be about 1,000 degrees.

A report from the Spartanburg Police Department said that the couple's family asked them on Saturday to perform a welfare check at their house after not hearing from them since Wednesday.

When police went to the home on Woodview Avenue at about 6 p.m. they said that they found all of the doors were locked, but one window was unsecured. When officers pulled the screen from the window and looked inside, they said they saw that the couple was dead.

Medics pulled themselves through the window and found that the home was "extremely hot."

Investigators said the man was laying unclothed in bed facing upward while his wife was found slouched in a chair by the foot of the bed.

Police said there were no signs of a struggle or of foul play, and firefighters said they found no evidence of carbon monoxide poisoning. Medics tried to read the couple's temperature with a device that read up to 106 degrees and found that both bodies had a temperature exceeding that maximum.

The family of the couple told police that they had seen them on Wednesday after they tried to fix the pilot light on the heater, which had gone out. They also said the woman had recently had a hip replacement and the man had fallen.

When the emergency responders went to the basement to check on the heater and water heater, one firefighter said "the heater was so hot it looked as if the basement was currently on fire."

They said that when they measured the temperature of the heater it registered 1,000 degrees, and they had to air out the home because of the presence of the strong odor of natural gas.

Here's a local news report about the incident:

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