When Louisville senior Jeff Fusinetti received a phone call last semester that his house was burning down, he laughed.

He thought it was another prank thought up by his friends.

He thought wrong.

He was partying in Nashville with his girlfriend when he received the first phone call that his College Street house was on fire.

“My friend called me at 4 a.m. and just kept calling,” Fusinetti said. “I was, like, ‘Yeah, right, you’re funny,’ and I just turned my phone off.”

The next morning, Fusinetti turned his phone on for the drive back to Bowling Green and discovered his voicemail full of distraught messages.

He started to think maybe this wasn’t a joke after all.

When he pulled onto College Street and saw his house he realized his friend wasn’t crying wolf.

“I came in the back and saw where it was all melted down,” Fusinetti said. “It was a white house, but it was black and the windows were all busted in.”

As Fusinetti searched for what was left of his stuff, he also searched for answers, but no one was there to even ask. His two roommates were gone.

“My roommates didn’t even call me when it was burning,” Fusinetti said. “They weren’t there when I got back. I didn’t even get the full story of what happened until two weeks later.”

The story Fusinetti got from the police was that one of his roommates had left a candle burning and that caused the fire.

He waited to see what was reported in the newspapers, but the fire received no coverage. He wanted to hear the detailed story of exactly what happened, but the only people who could give him that story were nowhere to be found.

His two roommates, whom he had only known for a few months, didn’t call him or talk to him for over a month after the incident. Even then they didn’t offer any condolences.

“They didn’t even apologize,” Fusinetti said. “I don’t dislike them, but I don’t hang out with them anymore.”

With the help of his girlfriend, former Western student Natalie Fields, Fusinetti gathered what was left of his personal belongings and moved out. He now lives with Fields in an apartment at Stonehenge – a place Fusinetti said isn’t likely to burn.

“I’m not paranoid about my place burning again,” Fusinetti said. “But I’m definitely more gullible when people play jokes on me ’cause I think they might be true.”