I've never known anyone to tamper with their smoke detectors, I knew one guy who tried smoking out the window, but he set the alarm off anyway,

They had no active smoke detectors.

The victims were kind of spread out in the house. Smoke detectors could have made the difference.

Our last two fires had smoke detectors, but no batteries, ... We're praying to get the word out (about smoke alarms).

This house had hard-wired smoke detectors, as a lot of homes built 30 years ago did. Because there was no power to the home, they were not working.

They didn't even try to tamper with it,