All the victims were discovered in a second-floor unit where the fire is believed to have originated.
HILLSBOROUGH - A Rutgers University researcher, his wife and their 13-year-old daughter were identified Friday as those killed in a two-alarm blaze that ripped through a township apartment complex Monday night.
Vinod B. Damodaran, 44, Sreeja Thekkekoical-Sasi, 38, and Aardra V. Nair, 13, were pronounced dead at the scene, the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office said Friday.
Damodaran has been a post-doctoral associate at Rutgers University since 2013, according to a spokesman for the school, Ernest Miranda. He was doing research at the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials at the university according to a bio associated with a book he co-authored on biomedical polymers.
Damodaran's professional profile indicated he had a doctorate and listed his areas of expertise as biomedical social sciences, chemistry, materials science, and polymer science.
The two-alarm fire damaged at least four apartments at the Hillsborough Garden Apartments on Farm Road, authorities said. The cause of the blaze remains under investigation, authorities said.
The fire was reported at 9:52 p.m. and appears to have started in a bedroom in a second-floor apartment before spreading to the roof, authorities said. When firefighters arrived, an upstairs unit was fully engulfed in fire, authorities said.
The adjoining units were immediately evacuated, authorities said. When the fire was brought under control just before 11 p.m., firefighters from Hillsborough Fire 36 were able to make entry into the second-floor unit and discovered the bodies, authorities said.