Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 30, 1993 TAG: 9304300184
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LON WAGNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FORK MOUNTAIN LENGTH: Medium
Shenandoah Marie Hanks, the children's 17-year-old mother, left her mobile home about 3 p.m. to take some spaghetti she had just cooked to her mother next door.
She remembered turning off the stove, but she said she may have left a potholder on it.
When she returned to the house, it was too late.
"I was getting in my car to come over here, and there was smoke everywhere," Hanks said.
She raced down the twisting, rutted lane to call the rescue squad, wrecked her car into a tree and ran the rest of the way barefooted over the gravel to a telephone.
Her father and the children's grandfather, Lonnie Ayers, tried to get the brother and sister out of the trailer alive.
He tried the front door, but it was too hot.
"I knocked that window out," Ayers said pointing at nothing but the smoldering, collapsed mobile home.
"I thought I might save at least one of them, but it knocked me back."
Shenandoah Hanks - Doah, her family calls her - said the heat pent up behind the window knocked her father back at least 5 feet.
Then, Ayers said, he heard shotgun shells that were stored in the trailer exploding.
"I had to get out of the way, or be killed," he said.
By then, he knew the smoke probably had killed Daniel and Trinity.
There was nothing left to do, but wait for firefighters to put out the blaze.
"I wanted to get them out so bad I didn't know what to do," Ayers said.
As the sun set Thursday on the hollow where many of the Ayers family live - off U.S. 220 in Franklin County about 12 miles south of Rocky Mount - only one of the children's bodies had been found.
The fire had been so hot, rescue workers had to spray water on the house and wait several hours to try to recover the other child's body.
But considering the children's ages, family members had little doubt both were dead.
"They're looking for the other one now," said the children's father, 21-year-old Daniel Hanks, as firefighters walked through the ashes.
Hanks said he had no insurance on the mobile home, which he was gradually expanding.
Daniel and Shenandoah Hanks lost everything but the clothes they had on and their cars.
Hanks said he would rebuild the house.
"Start over," he said, "Bout all I can do."
Hanks' mother wondered where the couple would even get money to bury the children.
Shenandoah Hanks tried to find solace in her faith in God.
But only four hours after her children had died, even that didn't make sense.
"One day we'll get to see them again," she said.
"They always say, `God giveth and God taketh away.' I just wish he hadn't taken mine."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB