The Devil Never Wins! The Morning of the Fire
- drj194
- Apr 14, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 20, 2024
Here’s a quick recap of my family's most recent story, which has truly been the darkest and hardest struggle my wife, children, and I have ever faced. It began with us running through our home at 5:15AM on the Thursday of August 25, 2022, desperately trying to save our children and her grandma from a raging house fire. Here’s an excerpt from my book about this event.
I still had not budged or even heard the first alarm (which Nicole tells me is not unusual). One second went by and then another, but the more she thought about closing her eyes, she just felt compelled to get up. “Ok, I know ten minutes isn’t really going to make a difference when I only got four hours of sleep anyway,” she thought as she sat up on the edge of the bed. That is the moment she noticed a strange orange glow shimmering through the window shade on our bay window facing the deck to the side of our bedroom. As she pulled the shade back, she screamed “Jonathan, the house is on fire!” I jumped out of bed instantly and ran to get the fire extinguisher while Nicole, phone still in her hand, called 911 as she ran upstairs to get our daughter and son. Nicole had seen the fire much clearer from her viewpoint, which was a blazing flame engulfing two stories on the back outside of our house. I could only see it on the first floor level, but it was covering the large window beside our kitchen dining area, like it was trying to force its way inside. I had no sooner pulled the safety pin from the fire extinguisher when it broke the first window pane. I pulled the trigger but that flame barely even parted as it broke one pane and then another, entering the main floor of our home with terrifying force, heat, and speed. Nicole was not quite to the top step when the flame broke through, and she raced to get the children out of their beds. They could immediately hear the urgency in Mommy’s voice, so there was no hesitation as they jumped out of bed. At this point everything near the back wall of the house, furniture, window treatments, walls and floor, was caught in a blaze almost instantly. As I saw Nicole and the children running downstairs I dropped the fire extinguisher, turned to them and said, “ I’m going down to get Grandma.”
When I reached the basement living room, I saw Grandma had already been awakened by the deck starting to fall just outside of her bedroom window and exit door. She was stepping out of her bedroom in her nightgown, and she tried to open her door to go outside, but I knew we could not go anywhere near the back of the house. I told her, “We will have to go up the stairs and out the front door, but we have to hurry because the fire is already inside!” We locked arms as I pulled her up the steps behind me as fast as she could go. I knew it would be bad when I reached the main floor again but nothing was going to stop us from making it twenty-five feet from the basement step to the front door. That is when it hit me like a punch in the stomach, the smoke! It sucked the air right out of my chest when I opened the door from the basement, and it was so thick I could not see anything. They say that a fire searches for oxygen wherever it can find it, and its target was my lungs. I gasped for air with no success. All I could think was “Jesus help! We aren’t dying like this!” Grandma made it up the last three steps as I was gasping, so I just kept pulling her behind me. We felt our way through the formal dining room and finally to the front door. I could not breathe and I could not see, but I never felt the heat. As I stumbled to the front doorway Nicole met me and pulled Grandma outside. “Just get outside! I’ve got her!” Nicole said, as I fell out the door finally getting some air with my gasping breaths. Nicole had led the children into the front lawn and just made it a few feet from the house when she saw the entire attic roof structure cave in, crashing into the bedroom where our daughter was asleep less than a minute before. Seeing that happen while Grandma and I were still inside, she told the children to go the neighbor’s house across the street as she ran back down to find us. She told me later, “I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I wasn’t letting y’all die in there even if I had to drag you out.” She was filled with relief when she saw us stumbling through the smoke, but “I watched the flames follow you as you came to the door.” About halfway up into the yard, suddenly the heat hit me like a ton of bricks and I said, “We can’t stay in the yard it’s just too hot.” At that moment I knew that angels were protecting my family when I finally felt the heat for the first time after we were all safely outside. It turns out that the children never made it across the street when their mom told them to go, they stood there in our yard in case they needed to come help Mommy.
Once we were all outside, Nicole called 911 again; to us, it seemed like it had been a long time, but the phone calls were placed only two minutes apart. Miraculously, we had gotten people out from three floors of the home in just two minutes after waking from a sound sleep. We all stood there in our neighbor’s driveway —watching, praying, crying — but holding on to each other. In that moment, Nicole looked into the children’s eyes and said, “The devil didn’t win today. That fire was meant to kill every one of us, but it couldn’t. The devil never wins.”
If you know someone in this place today, share my book and songs with them!
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