You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
9 people dying in one house fire.
9 people don’t usually die in 9 house fires.
50 people don’t normally die in 9 house fires.
Typically ovens burn and couches burn and cigarettes burn and smoke detectors melt.
Death in a house fire is not as common as you may think.
Thursday morning, in Greenville, Kentucky, a mother and her 8 children perished in the dark of night.
I’ve been covering news since 1988. I have covered hundreds of deaths.
I can’t remember 9 people dying in a single house fire.
I certainly have never covered a mother losing 8 of her 9 children in a single house fire.
I am listening to the chilling 911 call.
It begins with the frantic panting of a neighbor calling for help.
“There’s a house burning,” she screams into the phone.
Dispatchers take this call at least once a night.
“Where’s the fire,” the calm dispatcher responds.
“My neighbor, he got out.” She pants stridently.
You can hear the magnitude of pain in her voice.
“How many people are in the house?” the dispatcher queries with more alacrity.
“5 or 6 people are in there. He said they are all dead!”
There is a moment of silence.
Now everyone on the line is on the same page. Everyone on the line knows this is a one in a million 911 call.
“They’re all dead?” the dispatcher mournfully questions.
“They are dead. Flames are everywhere. He knocked on my door.”
And so it goes.
A mother and her 8 children dead. A father and his 11-year-old daughter in the burn unit in very bad shape.
I saw the house on this simple lot in a simple part of Kentucky.
It is country and quiet. It was just sun set when I arrived. The smoke had long since expired. All that is left is charred structure and wet household possessions.
I stare at a little girls pink and purple bicycle. It is untouched on the side of the driveway.
Such a simple mechanism representing so much.
I stare at the bike knowing it will never be ridden again. Nothing will be the same ever again.
The smell of death is in the air. The invisible spectre of smoke, the stench of devastation here is unmistakable.
Death leaves its calling card. Death is a beast that slithers through the night. It exudes an unmistakable scent, like a viper in heat, letting all know it’s present.
Death is dark and ominous and has a stench that you never forget.
I will come to learn that the father is a pastor at a local church.
I will interview the Deacon in the church.
He is a round man. A simple man. A man of the cloth.
He describes the family as wonderful, and the pastor as a wonderful guy.
I ask him about the pain in his heart.
“There’s no describing it,” he says sniffing up a tear. There is only a void. And tears. I have shed tears today.”
“A mother and 8 children”, I say solemnly. “You are a man of the cloth. What’s the purpose?
He stares ahead, blankly.
I see a child’s bible sitting on a small table. We are in a children’s classroom.There are pictures of lambs and Jesus and story books of Noah’s Ark nearby.
“There’s no way to humanly make sense of it,” he says, his voice quivering. “but spiritually, there was a reason.”
He pauses staring at the floor.
“I don’t know what it was, humanly I can’t explain it.”
The man will tell me that the 35-year-old mother was at the church for Wednesday night church service.
“She was speaking with the pastor’s wife,” he says. “The last thing she said was I’m going home.'”
He pauses, then says with a powerful message.
“And now she truly is home.”
I think about his haunting words as I drive back to the scene for a few extra shots we need to tell our story.
She was at church at 10pm. 4 hours later she and her 8 children would be dead, snatched from this world by a death monster that has no soul.
It’s a 90 minute drive back to Nashville.
We have to be fast to get this on the air. But my photographer and I know we have to be delicate, to tell the story with accuracy and respect.
As my photographer gets the last shots of toys against a darkening sky.
I look at the nearby vacant lot.
It is filled with satellite trucks and news cars from Kentucky and Tennessee.
This is a big story. This is a national story. With death comes the news. It brought them. It brought me. We all smell death’s evil stench.
The headline. It’s not one you often utter: A mother and 8 children dead. The kids range in age from 4-16. The youngest were twin boys.
I am stunned at the horrific tragedy, the seemingly senseless loss of life.
A wall heater did all this?
What’s the purpose, I wonder.
The pastor doesn’t know. None of us can know.
How does this make sense?
It doesn’t.
If there is a reason for this, it is unclear, unknown, unfathomable.
We like to say this is part of God’s master plan.
I’d like to see the play book for this one.
5 girls. 3 boys. Dead.
A mother and wife dead.
Can you imagine being the survivors?
A father once with a baseball team for a family, now with an only child.
An 11 year old girl with 8 brothers and sisters, now left to wonder why she lived with only burned hands.
Is it a tragedy? Is it a mystery? Is it a cruel hoax?
Some day we will all pass over to that place filled with light and enlightenment.
Perhaps then, and only then, it will all make perfect sense.
But right now, it’s a quagmire of wasted lives and senseless loss.
Why God?
Some times you hear a football player thank God for giving him the strength to throw a TD pass.
Just once I’d like to know whether God was helping the QB or watching over the fire family?
They say God is everywhere. If true he watched an entire family incinerate Thursday morning. He watched as the monster lurked in the darkness and plucked babies from this world.
So many esoteric questions that will never be answered in this life time.
It’s called faith. It’s the bridge that we humans use to rationalize what is impossible to understand.
A family huddled together to stay warm. A wall heater ignites something combustible.
Why?
Who knows?
Somewhere there is answer.
We just won’t know it in this existence.
Life’s Crazy™