"She was walking down the street on fire with black smoke just smoldering off of her ... as if that was a normal thing to do,” Regina Brockway, who lived in the apartment below the explosion, told the paper

Police in New York learned recently that Briscoe and Warner could be in Richmond.

“About three weeks ago we got information that we felt they were in Richmond, Virginia," Hornell police Chief Ted Murray told The Evening Tribune. "We actually contacted Richmond and gave them the information we had so they could be on the lookout for them.”

Warner has family in the Richmond area, Murray said.

Briscoe and Warner are believed to have been staying in a makeshift camp on the river.

“There’s an area where people live on little islands in the river. They suspect they may have been staying in a tent on one of those islands,” Murray told The Evening Tribune.

Several witnesses told Richmond police that Briscoe and the man she was with were carried downstream and over the low-head dam near the Manchester Bridge.