The home and a classic muscle car of a North Long Beach resident were charred in a fire Saturday morning.

Mark Ferrari, the resident of the home at the intersection of John Avenue and East 60th Street, said he had plugged a battery charger into an outlet in his home Saturday before stepping out to the front yard to work on the engine of his car..

Some time had passed when Ferrari noticed that the curtains in his home were on fire, and the window had been shattered by the flames. He quickly grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the foam through the broken window into the flames. He tried to use a nearby garden hose to douse the flames, but the fire continued to grow.

Just across the street his neighbor Abraham Torres and his wife noticed the smell of smoke. When they looked outside, they saw a flames shooting up over the rooftop. Torres ran over to help.

“We were about six feet away from the flames,” Torres said. The heat was so intense, Torres said he used the driveway gate as a shield from the heat while he used the garden hose to try and fight the flames. He said Ferrari seemed adamant about getting closer to the flames to make sure his cars weren’t also catching fire. Torres said his neighbor had received slight burns to his arm and the hair on the side of his head was slightly singed.

A few moments later, Long Beach fire crews responded to the scene. Brian Fisk, a spokesman for the fire department, said crews were dispatched to the house at 9:12 a.m. When they arrived, they successfully took down the fire in about 10 minutes. Fisk said one person was treated for burn injuries on the scene and was released. He didn’t identify the victim, but Torres said the only person he saw with injuries was Ferrari.

The cause of the fire is under investigation, Fisk said. He could not say if the battery charger had caused the fire.

As fire crews climbed on the roof of the charred house, some onlooking neighbors walked over to Ferrari to offer help. Torres’ wife said Ferrari was a kind man. He often would ride his bike through the neighborhood and wave to her kids. She collected some sandals and gave them to Ferrari.

Ferrari has a collection of old muscle cars in his driveway as well as bicycles and snowboards. Only one car had part of its roof and trunk burned as a result of the fire.

As firefighters collected their hoses and removed burnt pieces of the walls and roof from the house, Ferrari returned to work on his car—his face still covered in soot.

“Overall, I’d say it was a bad day,” Ferrari said.