In 1985, seven children including my youngest son Lyndon, 17, died at 633 Breckenridge Street.
My daughter Lori worked at Hardees from 11 o’clock at night until 5:30 in the morning. Her children’s father took care of them while she was at work.
When she got her two school-aged children off to E.M. Rollins, she would fix the other children breakfast and then take a nap. She would then get up and fix the children’s dinner.
Lori had to wash her work clothes every day. She would hang them on a chair beside the heater to dry.
One day she was in the kitchen when the clothes caught fire while she was out of the room. Her brother called the fire department. Only her clothes caught fire, nothing else.
My daughter had complained to the man who came around to collect the rent that something was wrong with the electric. He never did anything.
The morning the fire started was not from the heater like the firemen said. He said the fire got so hot it set an arm chair on fire. That is not true. The chair was across the room near the front door and the right side of the chair was burned. The heater was on the left side of the chair.
They tried to find the cause and concluded it was my daughter’s fault.
A fire marshal came from Washington, D.C. came down the very next day. He checked out the house and said that it did not come from the heater. He saw that there were pieces of wood sitting behind the heater. He said if it had gotten that hot it would have scorched the wood.
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A floor plan of the house drawn by Anne Jones
Click to enlarge image
At one time the house was divided into apartments. The owner turned it into a one-family house. He only cut one door to the house between the two downstairs rooms. There was not a door upstairs between the bedrooms. If he had, the children would not have been trapped upstairs. They could have come down the other way because there were stairs on the outside of the living room.
The heat was pulled up where the children were. The one window was too high for the children to exit from. The police told me my son put them all under the bed and then lay down in front to wait for help.
This is all because someone wanted to save money and cut corners. I was told he got rich from their deaths.
The Bible says: “”For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
This could have been prevented if someone had inspected the house and told him that he needed to cut a door between the two rooms.
It’s still hard on birthdays and the anniversary of their deaths, but life goes on.
It’s important to have a way to escape if you are trapped.
Anne Jones
Henderson
Editor’s Note: The house described in this article is still standing and occupied.