Rising from the Ashes: Burnett School of Medicine Graduates Thrive After Cooper Apartment Fire
Four Burnett School of Medicine at TCU graduates turned the devastation of The Cooper Apartment blaze into the fuel for their residency success.
FORT WORTH – June 23, 2025, is a date Mariah Drown, M.D., ’26, would like to forget, but it was also the day she discovered a level of inner strength she didn’t know she possessed.
At the time, Dr. Drown was in the final week of a high-stakes away rotation at a hospital in San Francisco. Her day began with a frustrating setback, the catalytic converter had been stolen off her friend’s car. But by that afternoon, a stolen car part was the least of her worries.
“I got calls that the apartment complex I’ve lived in for four years was catching on fire — and it was on my floor,” Dr. Drown said.
The Cooper Apartments, located in Fort Worth’s Medical Innovation District (MID), had been her home since she started at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at TCU in 2022. On that June afternoon in 2025, the complex directly across from the medical school was engulfed in a six-alarm blaze. The fire, which originated on the roof, caused a partial collapse of building one and displaced 834 residents, including 40 medical students.
“I had to learn what it was like to have one suitcase of belongings,” Dr. Drown said. “Initially it was sad because that was home and a safe space.”
While Dr. Drown was hundreds of miles away, her classmate Angela Abarquez, M.D., ’26, was processing the same shock from an away rotation in Austin.
“It became more clear later on that people were not able to return to their units,” Dr. Abarquez said. “I was just thinking, ‘where am I going to go?’ It was very stressful.”
Two other classmates, Jonathan Bindi, M.D., ’26, and Amanda Block, M.D., ’26, also lived at The Cooper, though their units were spared from the flames.
Faced with the uncertainty of where she would live when she returned to Fort Worth, Dr. Drown made a pivotal choice. She decided to channel her stress into her work, refusing to let the chaos in Texas derail her performance in California.
“It was important to me to maintain a level of dedication and focus,” Dr. Drown said. “I was able to put it on the back burner. I wanted to perform as well as I had the week before.”
That compartmentalization paid off. While the Fort Worth and TCU c0mmunities rallied to raise money for the Student Emergency Fund, the medical students stayed focused on their goals. That resilience led to a successful Match Day for the group: Dr. Abarquez matched in internal medicine at Ochsner Clinic Foundation, Dr. Block in psychiatry at UNC Hospitals, and Dr. Bindi in ophthalmology at UC Davis Health.
Dr. Drown will head to Brooklyn, New York, to start an emergency medicine residency at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. It’s a specialty that requires a calm mind in the middle of a crisis, a skill she proved she already possesses.
“Ultimately, it taught me a lot about adversity,” Dr. Drown said. “And how to keep going even when your world is a little shaky.”