A quick-moving, four-alarm fire has gutted three homes in Jersey City. 

The fire started inside a vacant home on McAdoo Avenue at around 9 p.m., according to firefighters and witnesses. It quickly spread to two nearby homes, sending flames shooting through the roof and thick black smoke billowing high into the air. 

Neighbors said the flames jumped from one house to another in minutes. 

The blaze was knocked out by 10 p.m., according to the Jersey City Fire Department, but firefighters were still on the scene late Thursday night pouring water onto hot spots. 

Residents could be seen consoling one another as they returned to find their homes destroyed. One woman told NBC 4 New York she had just moved two days ago into the home next to where the fire started, and she's lost everything. 

Neighbors suspect squatters in the vacant home may have played a role in the fire. The cause of the fire is under investigation. 

No injuries have been reported. 

A 32-year-old woman was at the hospital recovering Friday morning after police say she was caught in the crossfire of a shooting while driving through North Philadelphia.

Shortly after 11 p.m. Thursday, the woman was driving on 17th Street near Diamond with two friends when the group heard gunfire, according to police. The woman "realized she felt pain in her back," according to Chief Inspector Scott Small, and discovered she'd been shot.

Police said a barrage of at least 10 shots were fired at the intersection, and that one bullet made its way through the trunk of the car the victim was driving, narrowly missed two passengers and struck her. She was taken to Temple University Hospital and listed in critical but stable condition.

Police on Friday were continuing to investigate the shooting and search for the gunman.

Because the shooting happened just west of Temple University's main campus, Temple police responded to the shooting, and the school sent students an alert regarding the incident. No students were believed to be involved or injured, authorities said.

The mystery surrounding the death of a young Drexel University graduate who was found beaten and possibly strangled in her West Philadelphia apartment Thursday afternoon continued Friday morning as investigators worked to gather clues in the case.

A property manager found 27-year-old Jasmine Wright dead in her third-floor apartment on 50th Street near Locust shortly after 3 p.m. Thursday, authorities said. He alerted police, and medics pronounced the young woman dead about 3:30 p.m. Wright's family had contacted the property manager to check on her when they became worried about her.

A key detail in the early investigation into Wright's death emerged as investigators combed her home for evidence: There were no signs of forced entry into her apartment, and the place was not ransacked.

Wright's death left her neighbors in West Philadelphia, who said she was a well-liked young professional, stunned.

"It's hurt me just to know that it's right next door," neighbor Keith Hooks told NBC10. "And to happen to that person who didn't bother a soul."

Police continued to hold Wright's house as a crime scene early Friday morning, NBC10's Matt DeLucia reported. They said investigators have no officials suspects in the case but were pursuing leads.

Police responded to not one, but two incidents of a female disrobing in public in Philadelphia Thursday.

The most recent incident happened about 11:40 a.m. on the I-95 ramp from Aramingo Avenue.

Pennsylvania State Police received a phone call about a woman disrobing on the highway.

When they arrived, they encountered an abandoned car and a woman who was apparently in the process of disrobing.

State Troopers ushered the woman into a police car and used a tarp to shield her from the public’s view.

The woman is reportedly undergoing evaluation.

Pennsylvania State Police told NBC10 that it was the second incident of a woman disrobing in the same area Thursday. The details of the first incident were not immediately known.

A robbery suspect whom police officers in Delaware County shot after he allegedly leveled a gun at them remained in critical condition early Friday morning, officials said.

The incident started when officers were called to a robbery at J&J Grocery store on the 6400 block of Market Street in Millbourne Borough about 7 p.m., authorities said. When they arrived, officers spotted a man matching the suspect's description and approached him. That's when police say the suspect pulled a gun on the officers, prompting them to open fire on him.

The suspect was hit multiple times. He remained in critical condition at Presbyterian Hospital early Friday morning. His age and identity were not immediately known, authorities said.

No police officers were injured in the run-in, and the shooting remains under investigation.

When Loren Peters arrived in the emergency room in October 2013, bruises covered his frail body, and blood oozed from his gums.

The 85-year-old had not been in a fight or fallen down. Instead, he had been given too much of a popular, decades-old blood thinner that, unmonitored, can turn from a lifesaver into a killer.

“My goodness, I’ve never seen anything like it,” recalled Lorna Finch, Peters’s daughter, of the ugly purple bruise that sprawled from the middle of her father’s stomach to his hip. “It was just awful.”

Peters took Coumadin at his Marshalltown, Iowa, nursing home because he had an abnormal heart rhythm, which increases the risk of stroke. It’s a common precaution, but the drug must be carefully calibrated: too much, and you can bleed uncontrollably; too little, and you can develop life-threatening clots.

When nursing homes fail to maintain this delicate balance, it puts patients in danger. From 2011 to 2014, at least 165 nursing home residents were hospitalized or died after errors involving Coumadin or its generic version, warfarin, a ProPublica analysis of government inspection reports shows. Studies suggest there are thousands more injuries every year that are never investigated by the government.

“It’s an insidious problem,” said Rod Baird, president of Geriatric Practice Management, a firm that creates electronic health records for physicians working in long-term care facilities. Because it’s so easy to get wrong, “Coumadin is the most dangerous drug in America.”

Nursing homes around the country are routinely cited for lapses that imperil residents, from letting those with dementia wander off to not stopping elders from choking on their food. For years, advocates, researchers and government officials have worried about the overuse of antipsychotic medications that can put elderly patients into a stupor and increase their risk of life-threatening falls. A national initiative helped reduce the use of such drugs among long-term nursing home residents by 20 percent between the end of 2011 and the end of 2014.

But the dangers of the widely used Coumadin have drawn relatively little scrutiny, perhaps because the drug has clear benefits. Still, improper use has caused some patients incalculable suffering and, in some cases, greatly hastened deaths.

Dolores Huss, an 89-year-old grandmother of eight, died from internal bleeding after a San Diego facility gave her an antibiotic that multiplies the effects of Coumadin then didn’t alert her physician that she needed additional blood tests to measure how long it was taking her blood to clot.

Shirley Reim, recovering from hip surgery, was hospitalized with blood clots in her legs after a Minnesota nursing home failed to give her Coumadin for 50 days in a row and also didn’t perform the blood test ordered by her doctor. She suffered permanent damage. Details of the cases come from government inspection reports and lawsuits filed by the patients’ families, which were settled confidentially.

Periodic inspections document hundreds of additional errors that were caught early enough to prevent serious harm, but the real toll is likely much higher, experts say.

A 2007 peer-reviewed study in The American Journal of Medicine estimated that nursing home residents suffer 34,000 fatal, life-threatening or serious events related to the drug each year. North Carolina data shows more medication errors in nursing homes involving Coumadin than any other drug.

Despite such evidence, Coumadin deaths and hospitalizations have drawn only limited attention from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates nursing homes. Federal officials haven’t tallied Coumadin cases to see the full extent of the damage or identify common problems involving the use of the drug. Neither has the American HealthCare Association, the trade group for nursing homes.

The government investigates incidents like the one involving Peters that trigger complaints or surface in routine inspections. Sometimes, CMS slaps homes with “immediate jeopardy” citations, fining them and threatening to cut off federal funding if quick action isn’t taken. Villa del Sol, where Peters lived, received such a citation related to his care and was fined $33,345.

More commonly, though, homes are not fined and are simply asked to correct the problems and put policies in place to keep them from happening again, ProPublica’s analysis shows.

Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services identified Coumadin and other anticoagulants as one of the drug categories most frequently implicated in “adverse drug events,” calling on government agencies to work on solutions. In a statement, CMS, which is part of HHS, said it is raising awareness of such events, training its inspectors to do a better job at identifying them and working with nursing homes to prevent them.

In Peters’s case, no one at the nursing home conducted the blood test needed to see the effect Coumadin was having, even as bruises spread across his body over a two-week period, government inspectors later found. Peters never recovered, dying a few days after he was brought to the hospital.

Villa del Sol recently changed its name to Hawkeye Care Center Marshalltown. Doug Johnson, president of the home’s parent company, Hawkeye Care Centers, declined to comment by e-mail. “We adhere to privacy rules and practices and do not comment on litigated matters.”

A Breakthrough Drug, With Risks

Coumadin’s roots go back to the 1940s, when scientists at a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Wisconsin at Madison — the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation — came up with a rat-and-mouse killer called warfarin, a play off the nonprofit’s initials.

It was derived from a chemical in spoiled sweet clover that had caused cattle to bleed to death after dehorning, castration and other procedures. The substance disrupted the clotting process, so that animals hemorrhaged internally and died.

In the 1950s, drugmaker Endo Laboratories began selling warfarin for human use under the brand name Coumadin. It is in a category of drugs known as anticoagulants. An early user was then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was prescribed the medication after having a heart attack.

Coumadin was a breakthrough for patients with an array of heart troubles associated with blood clots. These include abnormal heart rhythms, along with pulmonary embolisms and deep vein thrombosis.

But the drug interacts badly with certain foods and medications, particularly antibiotics, and it requires regular blood tests to ensure it’s working as intended. The test measures the time it takes for blood plasma to clot.

In Medicare’s prescription drug program, known as Part D, 2.4 million seniors and disabled people filled at least one prescription for warfarin, the generic of Coumadin, in 2013, making it one of the most-used drugs. About 280,000 were prescribed brand-name versions, Coumadin and Jantoven. Many people, including health inspectors, continue to call the generic versions Coumadin because it is so well known.

About 1 in 6 of the nation’s 1.3 million nursing home residents take an anticoagulant, according to federal data from earlier this year; the majority are believed to be on Coumadin or its generic.

Newer anticoagulants, including Eliquis, Pradaxa and Xarelto, have entered the market in recent years and, in some ways, are easier to use than Coumadin. Patients taking these drugs don’t need regular blood tests and don’t have to avoid certain foods.

But unlike Coumadin, the effects of which can be reversed with vitamin K, there currently is no antidote if patients taking the newer drugs begin bleeding uncontrollably.

Some doctors also are reluctant to use the new drugs on seniors, particularly those with multiple health problems, because they carry their own risks, including gastrointestinal bleeding.

‘Perfect Setup for Bad Things’

Coumadin is tricky to manage even for otherwise healthy patients who don’t live in nursing homes. A study published last year by the lab company Quest Diagnostics found that patients taking Coumadin or its generic had lab results showing that the drugs had the desired effect only 54 percent of the time.

A 2011 report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the drug accounted for some 33,000 emergency hospitalizations among the elderly from 2007 to 2009, more than twice as many as the next highest drug, insulin. The study did not look exclusively at nursing home residents.

Given Coumadin’s challenges — and the coordination required among doctors, nurses, pharmacists and laboratories – nursing homes are the “perfect setup for bad things happening,” said Jerry Gurwitz, chief of geriatric medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Since the 1990s, when he first wrote about the problems of Coumadin in nursing homes, “very little, unfortunately, has changed,” he said.

Federal inspection reports repeatedly cite the same types of problems: patients not getting the drug as ordered, or given the wrong doses, or given without a doctor’s order.

A Texas nursing home resident received Coumadin for 34 days “without a physician order or adequate monitoring.” Blood was pooling in his mouth when he was sent to the hospital. A patient at a Minnesota home needed three surgeries for a blood clot in the left leg after not receiving 17 doses of the medication.

Failure to monitor the drug can lead to dangerous side effects. At a North Carolina home, a patient on Coumadin wound up in the hospital after no clotting tests were done for a month. An internal review found that a nurse “mistakenly put the February labs on the wrong month.”

Sometimes, the tests were done, but nursing homes didn’t alert doctors when the results were abnormal. At a Maine nursing home, a doctor wasn’t told when lab results showed a resident’s blood took too long to clot. Days later, when staff assisted the resident to the bathroom, the resident passed out and had no heartbeat. It is unclear if the resident survived.

In several cases, patients taking Coumadin fell, and nursing homes were cited for not doing enough afterward to ensure their safety. In Arkansas, a resident on the drug fell and hit his head during exercise class. A nurse said she didn’t call his doctor because the doctor “didn’t like to be called at night unless it was an emergency.” The resident died from the consequences of massive bleeding in the brain.

Vigilance Difficult to Enforce

Most patients who are taking Coumadin need it, experts agree. But problems with monitoring occur even at facilities trying to be vigilant.

A report published last year in The Consultant Pharmacist journal found that 12 New York nursing homes given tools to improve how they handled patients on Coumadin — including staff education programs — largely failed to improve their management of the drug.

“Improvements were not seen despite active intervention,” the report’s authors wrote. “If long-term care facilities are unable to voluntarily implement necessary improvements, then regulatory changes may be necessary to assure patient safety regarding anticoagulant use.”

David Gifford, senior vice president of quality and regulatory affairs at the American Health Care Association, said Coumadin errors can’t be viewed in isolation. “Those that approach one area at a time, they’re chasing their tail and they’re not going to see improvements,” he said. “This week, the soup du jour is Coumadin errors … then next week, it’s insulin errors.”

The association recently announced a quality initiative aimed at, among other things, reducing “unintended health care outcomes” — a broad category that covers various types of errors, including those involving medication.

Some long-term care associations say it would be better for CMS to work with the nursing home industry to change its practices rather than to take each incident in isolation, using citations and other sanctions to bring homes in line. Another concern is not to discourage doctors from prescribing Coumadin.

“It may be distorting a little bit to look at the immediate jeopardy outcomes [cited by regulators] without looking at the overall population that’s on it and needs to be on it,” said Cheryl Phillips, senior vice president of public policy and advocacy at LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit senior service organizations. “In fact, to not put people on blood thinners is a huge risk and in many cases malpractice.”

‘Things Didn’t Get Any Better’

Peters, a retired factory worker, moved into Villa del Sol in 2011 with his wife of more than 60 years, Arleta, who had fallen and could no longer walk on her own.

In September 2013, during a weeklong hospital stay, Peters was diagnosed with a variety of abnormal heart rhythms and sent back to the nursing home on Coumadin, the government’s inspection report said.

Both the hospital and Peters’s doctor left instructions for the nursing home to give him a particular test to assess his clotting rate. But it was never done. Instead, the staff gave him a different test intended for patients taking heparin, another blood thinner.

One nurse told inspectors that “it never occurred to her to look to see if the blood work was for what the physician ordered.” Another said “it never occurred to her that this resident was on Coumadin” and needed his blood monitored, according to the government report.

In the first two weeks of October, staff members made several notes in Peters’s chart about bruises on his body. Several entries mentioned scattered bruising; one noted a large bruise on the right abdomen that was purple in the center, green and yellow on the outside. The nurses decided among themselves that the bruises must have been from the lift they used to transfer him, the inspection report said.

Peters was taken to the emergency room after midnight on Oct. 15, 2013, because of the bleeding from his gums. There, a quick test showed that his blood took so long to clot that he might never stop bleeding on his own — a result his doctor told inspectors she’d never seen before.

The doctor later told an inspector that Peters’s bruises were so “horrible” she asked the hospital to take pictures of them. (Photos were taken, said Jeffrey Pitman, an attorney for Peters’s family.)

“They had to have noticed the bruises, and why didn’t they do something about it?” said Finch, Peters’s daughter, who is considering a lawsuit against the home.

At the hospital, doctors gave Peters vitamin K to try to counteract the Coumadin.

He grew confused, agitated, almost belligerent. He had trouble breathing.

“It just got to a point where things didn’t get any better,” said Finch, 59. “I asked his doctor: ‘What really is going on here? Do we have any hope of getting Dad back?’ [The doctor] said, ‘You know he’s pretty weak.’”

As hopes for Peters faded, his wife, too, became ill and was taken to the same hospital. Peters’s family decided to move him to his wife’s room so they could be together for his final hours.

When Peters was wheeled into the room, he was “pretty much unresponsive,” inspectors wrote. “However, when they put [his] spouse’s hands in [his], the resident woke up and was able to talk.”

He died the next morning; Arleta, three weeks later.

“When Dad passed away, she quit,” Finch said. “She just broke down and she screamed, ‘I am so mad at him, he didn’t take me with him.’”

Coveted Philadelphia Phillies pitching prospect Aaron Nola will make his major league debut on Tuesday, July 21.

Nola was taken in the first round of the 2014 MLB Draft by Philadelphia, and will be the first Phillie to make his debut the season after being drafted since Pat Combs in 1989.

The right-hander will debut in front of hometown fans at Citizens Bank Park against the Tampa Bay Rays.

Nola opened the 2015 season with Double-A Reading, where he went 7-3 with a minuscule 1.88 ERA. He was promptly called up to Triple-A Lehigh Valley, where he continued to excel with a 3-1 record.

Many pitching prospects are kept from stretching out their arm and throwing long innings. While the Phillies certainly haven't overworked Nola, they have allowed him the opportunity to shine. Nola has thrown 7+ innings eight times this season, and has topped 100 pitches twice. He has routinely worked between 90-95 pitches.

Nola generated 8.83 swinging strikes per start, an astounding number that he will hope to keep upon facing major league hitters.

Grady Sizemore, who was released by the Phillies on June 1, was picked up by Tampa Bay and has been hitting near the top of the lineup for the Rays in recent games.

Residents of Levittown in Falls Township, Bucks County reported seeing a suspicious man walking in their backyards Thursday night, according to police.

Christopher Baxter told the residents he was looking for a child at about 8:25 p.m., according to police. Officers were not able to validate this claim, and Baxter told them his proof was the voices he heard in his head.

Officers arrested Baxter on an outstanding warrant for violating his probation.

Baxter will also face charges for illegal possession of a controlled substance. Upon his arrest, police say they found a candy bottle filled with illegal prescription medications.

The Levittown community is already on watch for suspicious activities due to a recent trend of break-ins in the area. Falls Township Police have asked residents to immediately contact the police when they witness anything unusual.

Henry Ward of the Falls Township Police encouraged citizens to continue calling police to report any suspicious activity.

State Police in Delaware were investigating a serious hit and run crash Thursday night that hurt two pedestrians in New Castle.

Gia and Lisa Smith of New Castle, were attempting to cross the westbound lanes of Christiana Road around 10:30 p.m. when they were by a silver vehicle. The car did not stop and continued westbound on Christiana Road.

The crash occurred just west of Edinburgh Drive in New Castle.

Gia Smith was treated at the scene and then taken to Christiana Hospital Trauma Center by EMS. She was admitted in serious condition. Lisa Smith was also taken to Christiana Hospital. She was admitted and treated for nonlife threatening injuries.

The vehicle in question has been described as possibly a silver Nissan Altima, which police say would have heavy front end damage.

The westbound lanes of Christiana Road were closed for more than two hours Thursday night for police investigation. A

Delaware State Police asked anyone with information about the crash to contact Trooper Patrick McAndrew at Troop 2, Glasgow, at 302-834-2620. Citizens can also call the Delaware Crime Stoppers at 1-800-TIP-3333, or send an anonymous tip by texting to 274637 (CRIMES) using the keyword "DSP."