Celebrity Nooz

Tragedy in my neighborhood…

Hey Gang.. per the newsletter here’s the full story.
It is EXTREMELY rare that I go home early. But I had a floor
guy working on some finishing touches of a new floor for my
kitchen and he was going to finish up before my normal time of
getting home.

As I was driving up to the house I noticed there was a little
smoke in one of the neighbors yard. I figured it was a fire-
pit or someone was burning leaves.

I walked into the house and was talking to John the floor guy
as he was showing me what he’d done and I said, oh yeah, I wanted
to go into the back to make sure it wasn’t a fire.

I walked out and couldn’t get a good vantage point as the house
is a few doors down. I walked towards it and when I got about
1/2 way through my immediate neighbors lawn I realized the smoke
was too close to the house to be good.

I called 911 and they told me someone had already called it in
and the Fire Department was on the way.

I continued to go towards the house and could see that the smoke
was coming out of the house. As I was getting closer the windows
started to break and I had to move as I had no shoes on (I had
taken them off when I walked into the house and didn’t drean there
was a fire).

Moving to the front of the house I saw a lady at the sidewalk
and I asked her if anyone was in the house and she said she
didn’t know.

The garage door was open and there was a van in there so I wasn’t
feeling good about the situation. I went to the front door and
started pounding on the door yelling is anyone home?

The neighbor immediately next door came out and she was older
and was panicking. I asked her if she knew if anyone was home
and she said she didn’t think so. She was crying and asking me
if her home was going to be okay. I said I thought so as it was
a fair distance away and at this point it didn’t seem to be too
bad as far as smoke.

Well at the beginning when I was pounding on the door it was not
hot… but after a minute of or so it got hot. That’s when a
police officer showed up.

He asked if anyone was in the house and I told him I didn’t know
and for a couple of minutes I had been yelling and pounding on
the door.

He entered the garage (it’s odd that even in this tragic situation
it did not occur to me to enter into the garage, it seemed wrong)
and tried to get in through the door into the house but it was
locked. He was yelling and pounding too.

He came to the front door and I moved back and he tried to break
the door down. As he was putting his shoulder into the door,
smoke started to come out when he would get it open a bit. I
yelled “WHOA!, you better not do that”… thinking of the movie
‘Backdraft’ he said “Yeah move back, all the way to the side-
walk”.

I did and he was running around the house in a frenzy looking for
a way in, but then the flames started to burst everywhere. I
couldn’t believe how fast it was engulfing the house.

The fire department came (the paper said 4 minutes to response
and there is no frickin’ way this was true!).

In the meantime, John the floor guy comes down and tells me my mom sent him over because I had been gone a long time (hence not 4 minutes) and she was worried I would go into the house. Because  of all the fire trucks she knew it was a fire.

It was getting very crowded with people and trucks and I know
because of my mom’s poor vision she was a bit panicked so I told my one neighbor I knew I was going back to my house.

My mom was relieved when I got home, but I went into my backyard to see how things were going. That’s when I snapped the picture you are seeing with my camera phone. It’s from my patio.

I kept going into the house and back out checking with various firemen who were there and asking if anyone was in the house. The answer was always, they didn’t know anything.

The sinking feeling came when the fire was out and I saw a K9 unit pull up along with a coroners truck.

It wasn’t until last night (this happened on Tuesday afternoon)
that I found out the man of the house was found in the basement dead due to a gunshot wound. And that, officials won’t say it’s arson, but the fire did spread faster than normal.

At the time of writing this there is no other news. The woman
of the house has not been heard from. That’s not to say she’s
not around, but all the media is saying she couldn’t not be reached.

They are treating it as a homicide. He was 47.

Very sad and scary.

Anisa

Tags: frankfort fire

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.