Woman’s SUV is a Total Loss After Carowinds Parking Lot Fire

FORT MILL, SC – We’re still waiting to learn what caused a raging fire in the Carowinds parking lot. Nearly a dozen vehicles were destroyed Friday.

One woman says her SUV is a total loss and doesn’t know how she’ll replace it.

“For me, I was thinking there’s a thousand cars out there or more, it can’t possibly be my vehicle,” says Rock Hill, SC resident Sherian Leonard.

She and her family were in the wave pool at Carowinds when they heard the sirens and saw the thick, billowing smoke.

“As we’re walking out, that’s when my sister started sending me pictures of, like, the aerial shots and I’m looking down and see that it’s definitely my vehicle,” she says, “It wasn’t the vehicle that caused, it but it was one of the vehicles involved.”

Leonard showed pictures of what’s left inside her GMC Envoy. “My granddaughter’s car seat was, like, melted to the seat,” she says.

Now she’s afraid she won’t be able to replace it because she doesn’t have full insurance coverage.

She already lost another vehicle eight months ago when someone drove into it in the parking lot where she works.

Even worse, now she tells me she won’t have a way to bring her daughter to Nebraska, where she qualified for Nationals in speed skating.

“We have been trying to get funds together for that, because of my low income, and on top of all that, now we’re like, we don’t even have a vehicle,” she says.

In all, 10 cars were badly damaged. One had minor damage. No one was hurt.

Investigators are still not saying what sparked the blaze, but do confirm it started in one vehicle and then spread to the others before it was knocked down.