ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260088
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
BOBBY Early was watching television. He doesn't remember what program - it was just something to pass the time before hitting his bunk on a slow Saturday night.
Watching with him in the upstairs kitchen of Roanoke's Station No. 1 firehouse were his captain, David Bocock, and a third member of their ladder truck crew, Billy Gayle. Also at the downtown station was their shift supervisor, District Fire Chief Pat Taylor. It was Jan. 20. The time was 9:44 p.m. - a time that is now etched into their memories.
That's when they were interrupted by the abrupt ring of the station's fire bell.
The crew hurried from the kitchen and slid down the slick, brass poles to the waiting ladder truck, known as Ladder One, in the bay below. It was a drill they had done a thousand times before.
Pulling out of the firehouse, they listened to the police dispatcher on the two-way radio. The call was a 10-70 - a fire alarm in dispatcher code - at 1228 Stewart Ave. S.E., ``with possible entrapment.''
Early and company were about 12 blocks away.
Station No.6 at 14th Street and Dale Avenue Southeast was just two blocks away - almost close enough to see the house. Ideally, close enough to make a difference.
On duty were Bobby Biggs, Brian Wray and their captain, Jerry Hogan, plus an ambulance crew, Noel Gardner and Craig Champney.
To them, the first firefighters to arrive, it didn't look like a particularly serious fire. The house wasn't engulfed in flames or billowing with smoke. But in the air, there was a distinct burning smell.
Toys littered the front porch.
And on the sidewalk there was a mother in anguish.
Hogan immediately called back to the dispatcher and confirmed the fire. He also confirmed that there were children trapped inside.
It didn't sound good
By this time, other firefighters were en route from Station No. 11 on Bennington Street Southeast and from Station No. 3 on Sixth Street Southwest. A second ambulance was dispatched from Williamson Road. All were about three miles away.
Before they arrived, Hogan faced a split-second decision. The small, clapboard house had two front doors. He didn't know which door would lead to the source of the fire or to the children. As a 32-year veteran of the fire department, Hogan knew that this decision could mean a life.
He chose the door to the left.
What he found was a room filled with dense smoke reaching from his knees to the ceiling. It hung so thick he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. Hogan entered the room with Wray at his side. They wore air packs and breathing masks, and held tightly to the fire hose extending from the truck outside.
Initially, their job was to beat through the smoke and ``knock down'' the fire as quickly as possible, so that the next wave of firefighters could begin search-and-rescue efforts. Only they never found the fire. All they found was smoke.
Firefighters from Station No. 11 found the fire, through the door on the right, in a back room. As they knocked it down, Hogan and Wray dropped to their hands and knees. They started feeling along the floors for the missing children.
Ladder One arrived. Early reminded himself of the fire-fighter's unofficial creed: "Figure for the worst but hope for the best."
District Chief Taylor arrived.
In his 31 years with the fire department, Taylor said he had never witnessed a more dramatic or traumatic fire scene than this one. He was particularly struck by the size of the crowd on the street, by the mother weeping and screaming on the sidewalk, and by the frantic sounds he heard on the radio as the firefighters reported back to him from inside the house.
Their breathing was deeper, faster, more excited than he had ever heard before.
He had trouble understanding them.
It didn't sound good.
He barked out: ``Do a rapid search.''
`I swear he moved'
Early knew he had to get upstairs where the mother said her four children, plus their grandmother, were trapped. Finding the stairs proved difficult because of the way the house had been divided into three apartments.
The stairs were in the back, accessible only through the back door or through the left downstairs apartment. A wall blocked them from the right downstairs apartment. However, it was somehow through the right downstairs apartment that Early, also feeling his way blindly through the smoke on his hands and knees, found the stairs.
He believes now that the wall must have burned away.
Flames licked at the steps as Early scrambled to the second floor along with two other firefighters. He crawled along the upstairs hallway. Then he turned into a room.
There, lying on the floor, he found Goldie Duncan, the mother of the anguished woman on the sidewalk. Cradled underneath her motionless body was her 6-year-old grandson, Mark Leftwich. Also stretched out motionless on the floor were 5-year-old Clyde Leftwich and 4-year-old Patrick Leftwich. And in a box filled with clothes and toys was the youngest Leftwich, 3-year-old Nancy.
``She looked like a baby doll sitting in that box,'' Early said.
The fire had never reached them.
But heat and smoke had.
The firefighters struggled for the right words to describe what they saw. It was like they were "well-cooked," they said later.
Early believed there might still be hope. He pulled 6-year-old Mark from under his grandmother and ran from the house. On the front porch, he handed the boy to another firefighter who carried him to a waiting ambulance.
``I swear he moved,'' Early said. ``I swear he moved.''
In the ambulance, Craig Champney and John Olinger tried to revive the boy, who wasn't breathing and who showed no pulse. They found there was little they could do. They tried compressions on the boy's chest to jump start his heart. Nothing. They tried to snake a breathing tube down his windpipe, but his airway was too blistered and swollen.
``It was a helpless feeling,'' Champney said.
`How could this happen?'
Back in the house, word passed quickly that the remaining three Leftwich children and their grandmother would not be coming out. Downstairs, Jerry Hogan, the captain who first arrived on the scene from Station No.6, stopped his search efforts and cried in the darkness.
Hogan wasn't alone.
Early's thoughts turned to his daughter, Katlin, a kindergartner at Mount Pleasant Elementary School, and to his wife, Donna. He wondered if they were safe. He wanted to go home to them.
Early was not alone.
``It was very disheartening and discouraging, as hard as everyone had tried, and as close as it was to a fire station,'' District Chief Taylor said. ``You just asked yourself how could something like this happen.''
He described the firefighters as "extremely tired with eyes open," like zombies. "I could see the look on the men's faces. The stress. I knew it was going to be a long night.
"They felt like they had failed - to lose that many people in a single fire."
In fact, the chief said, they hadn't failed.
Their response time couldn't have been faster.
The truth, he said, is that the children and their grandmother probably died before the firefighters arrived on the scene.
In the grim hours that followed - and even months later - they tried to take comfort in this truth.
Phillip Dillon voiced the thoughts of many of his peers. ``You know that you did the best you could,'' he said, ``but sometimes your best isn't good enough.''
Dillon and others were bothered that there were no smoke detectors in the house, which the Leftwich family had been renting. They were bothered at the way the house had been divided into three separate apartments.
They were bothered that the door to the bedroom where the victims were found was open. If it had been closed, that might have made a difference. And they were bothered that the window in the room had not been broken out during an escape attempt.
``I would have killed myself trying,'' Dillon said.
He paused. His thoughts turned to the children's grandmother.
``Maybe she killed herself trying.''
He paused again.
"You could second-guess all day, but the results are the same."
`An eerie quiet'
Champney, one of the paramedics who had tried to revive Mark Leftwich, later was called on for the solemn task of body removal. That was around midnight.
He described a chilling stillness when he entered the house. The only sounds were the floorboards creaking under his feet, and the dripping of water running down the soggy, charred walls. Nobody spoke.
``It was an eerie kind of quiet,'' Champney said.
The mother of the children, Patricia Leftwich, had been persuaded by this time to leave the scene. Still, many of her friends and neighbors remained outside.
Upstairs, Champney, 27, took a moment to ``psych'' himself up. Although paramedics are accustomed to a certain amount of death, he knew this would be different. The room was so silent.
``I won't ever forget what I saw,'' he said.
Meanwhile, a debriefing session was being quickly organized to help Champney and others cope with what they had just gone through. The session was the first ever of its kind in Roanoke, and Fire Chief Jim Grigsby made attendance mandatory for all 26 fire and rescue workers who had responded to the fire.
They entered a room in the Municipal Building around 2 a.m. and stayed nearly three hours.
Rick Osmann, director of pastoral services for Roanoke Memorial Hospital and Community Hospital, led the session. He is also coordinator of the Regional Critical Incident Stress Debriefing Team, and a former firefighter.
Going around the room, Osmann asked pointed questions about feelings and emotions. He came back again and again to the same theme.
``Shared burdens become less heavy,'' he said.
He told them it was normal to feel sad or depressed, to want to cry. He warned them not to let their emotions remain bottled up inside.
"They have to put their feelings on the shelf to deal with this stuff at the time," he explained. "Then it's hard to take their feelings back off the shelf."
Osmann acknowledged that debriefings can only help so much.
``Nothing makes it all better again. Nothing makes it go away.''
`Too upsetting'
Nelson Reed can testify that it doesn't go away.
Reed, 54, wasn't one of the firefighters who responded to the fire. But when he heard about it, his thoughts returned to 1969, when he was a young firefighter called to a blaze at 1023 Centre Ave. N.W.
It was a fire that killed three children.
It also was a fire that earned Reed some distinction. A picture of him on the roof of the house trying to resuscitate a naked infant won several state and local press and firefighters' awards.
``It sticks in your mind like it happened yesterday,'' he said.
After this more recent fire, Reed went to see Roanoke Mayor David Bowers. ``I told him that I want Roanoke to make worldwide news for having smoke detectors in every daggone house in the city.''
As for Bowers' response: ``He mentioned the word pro-active,'' Reed said.
The city has since taken steps to create a program for inspecting rental housing.
Still, for most of the firefighters interviewed for this story, the fire remains a difficult subject. It took weeks before many could discuss it. Some still won't talk. Others tried, but couldn't.
Billy Gayle, from Station No. 1, said the first thing he thought about at the fire were his two children. Then his voice cracked. He walked away. ``I'm sorry. I'm sorry,'' he said. ``It's just too upsetting.''
``There's nothing anybody can say,'' said Brian Wray, who was the first to enter the burning house with Jerry Hogan. So he said nothing else.
The debriefing got mixed reviews. Most of the firefighters acknowledged that it probably helped, although they wished it had been scheduled a day or two later. The night of the fire, most of them would have preferred instead to take a shower and go to bed.
Several said they could have done without the debriefing session altogether. ``Matter of fact,'' one firefighter said privately, ``it brought up a couple of things I hadn't thought to worry about.''
In the end, almost all agreed, home offered the greatest comfort.
Phillip Dillon remembered coming home in the twilight of Sunday morning. His wife and two children were still sleeping. He sat for awhile in each of his children's rooms, and watched them sleep. Then he woke up his wife.
``I need to talk to you,'' he said.
Early remembers being met at his garage steps by his daughter, Katlin. She always waits for him there when he works overnight.
That morning, he hugged Katlin twice as tightly and twice as long as usual.
Early, 35, has been a Roanoke firefighter for five years. It's a job he loves.
``It's like any other job,'' he said. ``You've got your good days and your bad days. I've had one bad day in five years. That ain't bad.''
LENGTH: Long : 258 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. - 3. WAYNE DEEL/Staff In January, four youngby CNBchildren and their grandmother died from heat and smoke inhalation
at the Leftwich home in Southeast Roanoke (top photo). Bobby Biggs
(at left in above photo) and Jerry Hogan were in the first
firefighting crew to arrive at the home. For firefighter Bobby
Early, being at the scene of the tragedy made him think of his own
family (left) and their safety. He said he simply wanted to get
home to his wife, Donna, and their 5-year-old daughter Katlin.
color
4. Phillip Dillon remembered coming home in the twilight of Sunday
morning. His wife and two children were still sleeping. He sat for
awhile in each of his children's rooms, and watched them sleep. Then
he woke up his wife. ``I need to talk to you,'' he said. color
5. - 6. Paramedics Craig Champney (above, left) and Noel Gardner
are stationed at the No. 6 firehouse in Southeast Roanoke. The men
joined the earliest firefighters at the scene in January, and
Champney and another medic tried to revive 6-year-old Mark Leftwich.
``It was a helpless feeling,'' Champney said when their efforts were
unsuccessful. Veteran firefighter Nelson Reed (below) recalled being
called to a fatal fire in Roanoke in 1969. ``It sticks in your mind
like it happened yesterday,'' he said. color WAYNE DEEL/STAFF