A Bridgeport detective outside 601 Colorado Ave. described the site of Friday night's fatal fire as an active crime scene. Yellow police tape roped off the property. And an arson specialist, Lorenzo Pittman, spent hours inside the house, collecting evidence and surveying the interior. With an unidentified cop in tow, Pittman took a private investigator working for Nationwide Insurance through the building.

Inside the house, blackened beams, entire walls burned through and melted, dangling pieces of twisted metal could be seen. Three days after the fire engulfed the house, the smell of smoke still hung in the air.

The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that Taniecha Blackwood, 27, and her sons, Elijah Boyd, 5, and Dwayne Dennis Jr., 4 months, died of asphyxia from smoke inhalation. But a spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office said, the manner and the circumstances are pending further investigation as to whether this was an accident, homicide, suicide or something else.

Details of funeral services for the mother and her sons had yet to be completed Monday, according to Delrissa Brown, Blackwood's aunt.

Outside the three-story house that Blackwood shared with her father, Robert Blackwood, who owns it, and a tenant, a sidewalk shrine to the family is growing. Sympathy cards were tucked in the top of the chain-link fence that fronts the once-stately-looking house.

Memorial candles in tall glasses burned on the sidewalk. And bouquets of white-and-pink roses, carnations and about two dozen stuffed animals sat between the fence and the yellow crime scene tape. Dwayne Dennis, who lost his fiance in the blaze, spoke with arson investigators inside the house and looked around briefly with Blackwood's father.

We were supposed to get married this summer, Dennis said, when asked about his engagement to Blackwood. That's when we wanted it to be.

Neighbors who saw the fire Friday night claim it started on the first floor, either in the vicinity of the porch or kitchen. That's where most of the fire was at first, on this side, Mario Sanderson, 14, said, pointing to the area where the kitchen once was.

They were nice people, the people who lived here, Sanderson said. That kid, Elijah, he used to come over to my house and play with my brother [Stephfan]. They'd ride their bikes together. They just learned how. We taught them how to ride [two-wheelers].

Over on the right side of the house, past the charred kitchen stove lying on the front lawn, sat Elijah Boyd's bicycle. A small, secondhand bike with its training wheels taken off leaned against the house. It appeared to be the only personal belonging to escape the blaze.

MariAn Gail Brown, who covers regional issues, can be reached at 330-6288.