“What did you say?” he asked.
Numbly, Mike heard her repeat the same words again. He hung up the phone and ran toward the vehicle that was parked the closest, his pickup truck.
16
Prairie Village’s annual homicide rate is almost negligible; usually the police department has no murders to investigate at all. Some years, they have one. Prairie Village is close to Kansas City—which has one of the highest homicide rates in the United States—but it is an island of tranquillity. The vast majority of its 25,000 people do not resort to violence.
Miriam Russell had worked as a dispatcher for the Prairie Village Police Department for three and a half years. Before that, she dispatched for a decade for the Kansas City, Missouri, police. She knew her job, and, more than that, she had developed a certain intuitive sense about the calls. All 911 calls in Prairie Village came directly into Russell’s communications unit, whether the caller needed emergency medical assistance, the police, or the fire department.
Russell’s shift had begun at 10:30 P.M. on Monday night, October 23, and she would work until 6:30 A.M., October 24. She had been on duty for just under two hours when the 911 line lit up at 12:21 A.M.
“The call came in,” she remembered, “but all I could hear was heavy breathing. I asked the caller if I could help them—what type of problem they had—and then the phone was disconnected. Based on my experience, I decided that there was some kind of distress with this caller, and it was not a routine 911 hang-up call.”
Prairie Village has an extended 911 service, which gives the address where a call originates. Russell glanced at the readout and saw that the hang-up call had come from a “Farrar Residence, 7517 Canterbury Court.” Something told her to treat it as an emergency. “I ‘toned’ the call,” she said. “That lets the officers know that we’ve got an emergency call that’s about to be broadcast. I sent two cars—red lights and sirens—to the residence.”
The first two Prairie Village officers she dispatched were Sergeant Steve Hunter and Officer Larry Lamb. Hunter was less than half a mile from the house; at that time of night, with lights and siren, he arrived in two minutes. It was now 12:24 A.M.
As he turned off Seventy-fifth, Hunter saw the trouble immediately. An orange glow illuminated the night at the rear of a huge house with a two-story stone entry.
Hunter radioed Miriam Russell to get the fire department rolling, then leaped from his patrol car and ran toward the burning house. As he loped across the driveway of the house just north of the fire, he saw a child and a woman, both in nightclothes, standing barefoot. The little girl was nearly hysterical.
“My brother and sister are in the house!” she cried. “They’re trapped! Please don’t let them die! Please save them! Please don’t let them die!”
The woman, who appeared to be in her forties, stood quietly, saying nothing.
Sergeant Hunter shouted into the radio transmitter he wore on his shoulder, alerting Miriam Russell once more: “We have people trapped in the house!” He wondered if anyone besides the two children might be inside the burning house, and he asked the little girl, “Where’s Mom?”
The woman finally spoke. “Well,” she said, “I’m Mom.”
Hunter had precious little time to ponder her strangely detached manner, but it stayed with him as he ran toward the burning house. The woman had seemed very calm, very cool—as if she had no connection at all to what was happening.
The front of the house looked to be uninvolved in the fire at this point, and Hunter had noticed that the front door was closed. When he ran around to the rear of the house—the east side—he was shocked: “I was met with an intense wall of fire shooting out from both the lower level and the upper level of the house.”
It was impossible to get in that way. He scrambled for the north end of the house. The first door he came to was hot and smoke was coming through the cracks. Not willing to give up, Hunter raced around to the front door and at that point, he noted gratefully that two backup cars had arrived. “I was going to try to make entry into the front door,” he said. “But [when I was] approximately twenty feet from the front door, the door seemed to be—like vacuumed in or sucked into the house…. It fell in.”
As hopeless as he felt, Hunter kept trying. There had to be some way to get to the children trapped inside. He saw another door, which appeared to lead into the multi-car garage. He tried to break its glass window with the butt of his flashlight. But the glass was too thick.
The blaze was being fanned by a stiff wind—Hunter had never seen a fire move so fast. As the flames roared in their ears, he and the other officers raced around the house, trying to find a way in. Hunter had been on the scene less than five minutes and already, he thought, the house was fully involved. Reluctantly, he ordered Corporal Curt Winn, Officer John Jagow, and Officer Larry Lamb not to try to go in.
Now they heard the fire sirens. Maybe, with the fire department’s equipment, someone might still get in, in time to bring out the brother and sister the little girl had begged Hunter to save.
He wondered how she had gotten out. And the mother: How had she escaped the flames?
Drs. John and Mary Forman had been sound asleep shortly after midnight on that blustery Monday night when they were awakened by their dog’s frantic barking. They heard their doorbell ringing and someone rapping on their side door. Waking more quickly than her husband, Mary Forman urged him to get up and answer the door. He led the way down the stairs and, still drowsy, opened the door without deactivating their burglar alarm. The alarm, designed to automatically call a monitoring service that would notify police and fire personnel, began to blare.
Debora Green stood at the Formans’ side entrance. She wore some kind of nightgown or muumuu. Her hair was very wet, and it looked uncombed, as if she had only run her fingers through it or towel-dried it.
“Call 111!” Debora cried. “My house is on fire. My children are in there.” Again and again, she asked John Forman to call, not 911, but 111.
From the door on the south side of the Formans’ house, the view was of their neighbors’ four-car garage. John and Mary could see flames above the top of the garage. John immediately grabbed the closest phone and called 911 to report the fire, stressing that three children were still inside the burning house. At the same time, Mary Forman called 911 from her car phone.
When John Forman returned to the door, Debora wasn’t there. It was easy to lose track of someone in the chaos of a fire, their barking dog, and the blaring burglary alarm. Forman noted the strong winds and, knowing how vulnerable their own shake roof was to fire, he fully expected their house to go up next. He and Mary ran to wake their four children and piled them into John’s car. He hurriedly backed it out of the garage and moved it to a safe spot. Then Mary Forman called Mike from her car phone and told him his house was on fire.
The first police car—Steve Hunter’s—had turned in to their cul de sac during John Forman’s call to 911. He was surprised at the quick response. He didn’t know, then, that someone had already called.
Other neighbors were getting their children out, just as the Formans had, and moving their cars from their garages to Seventy-fifth. The houses on Canterbury Court were huge, but they were built on relatively small lots with many trees. It was possible that the whole street could go up in flames, just as complete neighborhoods are turned to ashes in California fires. The wind blew heedlessly, making everything worse.
Meanwhile, although no one saw her but Debora, Lissa had somehow managed to climb out of the window of her room at the front of the house and make her way over the peak of the garage. The next time the Formans saw Debora, she had Lissa with her, and it was Lissa who was screaming at a policeman to save her brother and sister while her mother stood there as expressionless as a statue.
It took Mike only ten minutes to reach 7517 Canterbury Court. When he arrived there were fire trucks, police cars, and emergency vehicles everywhere. “I could see smoke and flames coming o
ut of the house from Seventy-fifth Street,” he recalled. “I talked to a firefighter briefly and asked him where I should park, and I parked up on Seventy-fifth Street in front of a police cruiser.”
Mike ran from his truck past the corner house and then the Formans’, until he was standing in his own front yard. There were three policemen there; soon, they all had to back off because of the tremendous heat.
Perhaps because the mind blocks out terrible realities, it did not occur to Mike that anyone was in the house. He worried instead about how he was going to get clothes for his children to wear because it looked as though everything they owned was going up in flames. “I thought of all the other hassles of a fire because I knew what it was like—we’d been through a fire before.” That fire had happened only eighteen months ago. Then, too, it had been a neighbor who called him and shouted, “Your house is on fire!”
Where would they all live now?
Mike had grabbed his mobile phone when he ran from his car, and now he called Celeste and told her that his house was burning. Later, he relived that moment, shaking his head at how well he had blocked out the worst possible scenario. “I said to Celeste, ‘I’ll bet Deb set it on fire.’ It never even crossed my mind that the kids would be in any danger. I assumed they would be out.” If Debora had set the last fire—which he strongly suspected now—she had been very careful to keep the children, and even Boomer, the Labrador, safely out of harm’s way.
Mike told Steve Hunter that he was the owner of the house that was burning. Hunter took his arm and walked him back toward Seventy-fifth Street.
“Where are my kids?” Mike asked, looking around at the crowd that had gathered, trying to find their familiar faces. He wondered where his children had been taken. They would be cold in only their pajamas. “He didn’t answer me,” Mike said softly. “And so I knew right away that something was wrong. I asked him again, and by that time we were at a police cruiser and he pointed inside the police cruiser and he said, ‘Your wife, Debora, and one of your daughters is in there. The other two children are in the house.’”
Mike let out a primal scream of pain and rage. He pulled away from Hunter and looked back at his house. The October wind was whipping the flames above the treetops. Tim and Kelly were inside that inferno. That could not be. He had been with them only a few hours ago, and they had been happy and laughing. He could not imagine that they could survive the awesome flames, which made a sound unlike anything he had ever heard. He knew—but he didn’t want to ask anyone whether what he feared was true. He didn’t want to hear the answer.
Slowly, Mike turned to Debora. “What have you done this time?”
She didn’t answer. She only stared straight ahead as she sat in the police car.
Maurice Mott is now the battalion chief of Consolidated Fire District No. 2 of northeast Johnson County, in charge of twenty firefighters and three fire stations. Altogether, District 2 serves nine cities. On October 24, 1995, Mott was a captain assigned to Station Number 2 in Prairie Village. He and his firefighters worked twenty-four-hour shifts, from eight in the morning until eight the next morning.
The tones sounded in Station Number 2 shortly before 12:25 A.M. Mott’s ladder company rolled out of the garage in moments. En route, they learned that two people were believed to be trapped in the house, and they went even faster. They were on the scene of the Canterbury Court fire at 12:31. Six minutes.
In firefighting, everything happens at warp speed. The battalion chief is the incident commander, sizing up the situation, deciding whether to call in more help, considering his water supply options, assigning men to tasks. “When we pulled up,” Mott said, “our driver was our pump operator so he got the water. I had two firefighters with me…. They pulled a hand line and approached the front door.”
Fire hoses come in different diameters, some far too heavy for firefighters to carry by hand. Indeed, firefighters designate the seriousness of a fire not only by the number of alarms sounded, but by the diameter of the hoses needed to fight it—“a two-and-a-half-inch fire,” a “one-and-three-quarter-inch fire.” This was obviously a two-and-a-half-inch fire. But Mott’s men could carry the hand line, and the next truck would bring the monitor, which looks a great deal like a cannon. Up to three hoses feed into it, and it can bombard a fire with 1,000 gallons of water a minute.
Seeing that theirs was the first company on the scene, Mott shouted assignments and then took off on his own. Preserving life is the number one priority of any firefighter. The from door faced west, but Mott first headed south and talked to a Prairie Village police officer. It was not a real conversation; it was a matter of shouting information as Mott ran by. “He [the officer] said he had been to an intrusion alarm at this house in the past,” Mott would recall, “and he felt there was a downstairs bedroom on the south end of the house.” That might mean there was some hope. The house appeared to have three levels. The upper floor was burning fiercely; the main floor showed fire; but the basement level might still provide shelter.
Mott could only hope that the cop’s information was correct, and that the two people trapped inside were in that basement bedroom. At the front of the house, flames were shooting out the windows above the door and showing through at least half of the roof. When Mott reached the south side, he could see the back of the house. “I saw fire from the gutter line to the ridge…. I saw fire blowing out of the back [east side] of the house and extending to a wood deck on the back of this house and a railing. That was on fire from the fire blowing out.”
It would be too late for anyone trapped upstairs in the north end of the house. Mott could not make his way across the backyard at all, even though the swimming pool was there. The billowing flames and intense heat barred his way. “I radioed ‘Command’ and advised him I had fifty percent involvement,” Mott said.
Every other firefighter on the scene was busy with his own assignment. Mott commandeered the police officer to follow him to the ladder truck to get a ladder and an ax. They ran to the south side of the house. It was the only hope: Mott didn’t see any fire through the windows at the south end. He climbed the ladder to a second-floor window and used the ladder to break it. Wearing an air tank, he leaned the top half of his body into the room, which he now saw was a bathroom. He could just make out the outline of a tub.
Three times, he yelled, “Fire Department!”
“I got no response,” he said. “I left the ladder at that window and came down to this window [at ground level at the southeast corner] and broke it out with my ax.” And again, he leaned his upper body into the room beyond. He could see perhaps two feet into the room; everything beyond was obscured by smoke. Again, he called out. Again, there was no answer.
The two men broke the southwest window and Mott grabbed handfuls of the vertical blinds hanging there, pulling them loose, tossing them out on the lawn. He noted that though they had burned spots they weren’t smoking.
Mott could not go in alone: firefighters must work in pairs, for their own safety. He ran to the command post and signaled a newly arrived crew to come with him. He and the three men who followed him had their turnout gear: helmets, coats, gloves, boots, air packs—everything possible to protect them against the raging fire.
Mott broke the group into two-man teams. “I directed the two other firefighters to go into the [main floor] window. I told them not to go too far because of the overhead fire.” Then he asked the remaining firefighter, Wayne Harder, to help him search the ground level. Harder was from another department. Mott had never seen him before; he might never see him again. Good firefighters are trained so well in the basic rules of rescue and survival that they know what to do. For these tense minutes, Mott and Harder would be responsible for each other’s lives as they felt their way through rooms whose ceilings might drop on them at any moment.
They entered through the window where the blinds had been and dropped to the floor to crawl on their hands and knees. “We search by feel … through years of train
ing,” Mott explained. “We listen to fire crackling and we feel our way around the house…. To keep our bearings, we search to the right—so no matter how many rooms we have—closets, bathrooms, kitchens—if we continue to go to the right, eventually we’ll end up back at the place where we made entry.”
Mott and Harder could do nothing about the blaze itself: they had no firefighting equipment. They were hoping to save lives. In each room, they looked in closets, under beds, under tables. They moved through what was obviously a bedroom, sweeping the floor with their arms spread wide. They found no one. They were trying to buy time, and it was too awkward to crawl. They risked getting up off their hands and knees and walked in a bent-over shuffle.
The next room was a recreation room. Again, they found no one. They moved on to a hallway and came to a closed door. Mott opened it—to find a wall of fire. “I could see through the floor joists to the first floor of the residence,” Mott said. There was nothing they could do here, with the fire blazing above all the way to the roof. Mott closed the door.
In what was obviously a playroom, they found only piles of toys and dress-up clothes. They entered a room with a pool table, but they didn’t stay long. The ceiling fell in on them. Sheetrock, insulation, and boards let go and knocked Mott and Harder to their knees. Their time to find someone alive had run out. Their time to stay alive themselves was about to do the same.
After committing what he had seen inside to memory, Mott knew that they could be the next victims if they didn’t get out of there. “We had done our jobs.” In the dark, working to the right, they found the room where they had entered the house. Outside, they rejoined the other pair, who had worked their way in past the bathroom one floor up. They had not found anyone either.