ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997 TAG: 9703100094
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK THE ROANOKE TIMES
``Bunny'' Hardy's relatives never believed the fire department's finding on what caused the fatal fire.
It was a new year, and Barbara "Bunny" Hardy was making big plans.
She had just found a job working in the kitchen of a Roanoke nursing home. Hardy had dreams of one day going to cosmetology school and opening her own hair salon. But her first priority was to move out of a small upstairs apartment where she, her boyfriend and her two sons lived in a crime-ridden area of Southwest Roanoke.
The corner of 13th Street and Chapman Avenue - with its drug dealing, late-night traffic and gunfire - was not the kind of place where Hardy wanted to raise a family and start a new life.
"She wanted to get off that strip; that's what she called it," her sister, Carolyn Hardy, said. "She couldn't stand it, but it was a place she could call home until she could find something better."
Hardy kept telling her sister "a couple of more weeks," Carolyn Hardy recalled Saturday. "A couple of more weeks."
But Bunny Hardy never made it off the strip.
Late on the night of Jan. 13, 1995, fire broke out in the apartment. Trapped by the flames, Hardy jumped from a second-story window. The 28-year-old woman died where she fell, her body burned and her lungs charred by smoke.
Her boyfriend, 26-year-old Michael Todd Thomas, never made it out of the apartment. His body was found on a sofa bed, burned so badly that authorities had to use dental records to identify him.
In the two years that followed, family members were never satisfied with the Roanoke Fire Department's ruling: That the fire started accidentally when Thomas dozed off while holding a smoldering cigarette.
Relatives suspected all along that the couple fell victim to the kind of violence Bunny Hardy was trying to escape.
Last Wednesday, they found vindication.
A grand jury in U.S. District Court in Roanoke returned indictments against an alleged organized-crime family that authorities say was responsible for nine arsons since 1990. Among the allegations: that the owner of the Speedway Market, just across the street from Hardy's apartment, plotted to burn down a competitor, The Corner Store. The indictments also allege that Hardy's apartment was firebombed because she and Thomas were believed to be witnesses to the earlier arson.
"It has brought me peace of mind to know that the truth has come out that she was murdered," Hardy's mother, Gracie Calloway, said. "There was a rumor out there that Bunny was negligent, and I know good and well that she didn't go to sleep with a cigarette in her hand."
Members of the Thomas family found out by watching the 5 o'clock news.
"It's a big, big relief, because I always thought that somebody did this," said Thomas' mother, Esterline Thomas. "I told them when it first happened, 'That fire couldn't have started from a cigarette.' I didn't believe it. I never believed it. I've always thought that these people had something to do with it."
Thomas' family said it's possible that he might have seen something in the early morning hours of Jan. 13, when a Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window of The Corner Store. A so-called organized-crime family, led by Joseph Abed, is accused of starting that fire to eliminate the Speedway's competition, then firebombing Hardy's apartment at 4141/2 13th St. that night to get rid of potential witnesses.
But Carolyn Hardy is convinced her sister saw nothing.
The two sisters talked about the fire that afternoon. "She didn't say that she had seen anything or knew anything about it," Carolyn Hardy said. Hardy believes her sister - who was just 10 months younger than she was and very close - would have told her if she had seen anything suspicious.
Later that night, after visiting friends, Carolyn Hardy dropped her sister off at the 13th Street apartment. Carolyn Hardy wasn't planning on going to church that night, but something made her suddenly decide to take Bunny Hardy's two sons, Jarad and Jont, with her.
Carolyn Hardy says it was the Lord's work.
"A voice just came up out of me that said, 'Jarad and Jont, let's go to church.''' If the two boys, who are now 9 and 10, had not gone to church that night with their aunt, they likely would have perished in the fire.
When the service was over, Hardy learned from her pastor that there had been a deadly fire.
As Hardy's two sons, her mother and two sisters gathered Saturday afternoon in the Mercer Avenue house where Carolyn Hardy now raises the two boys, the family flipped though photographs and talked about their loss.
Because she was born on an Easter Sunday, Barbara Marie Hardy became instantly known as "Bunny."
Carolyn Hardy remembers her as a "happy-go-lucky girl," with a ready smile and a contagious laugh. The year she graduated from William Fleming High School, classmates voted her the class clown.
"You could be down in the dumps, but she could have you rolling on the floor in no time," Hardy recalled.
But there was also a serious side to Hardy, the part of her that wanted to parlay a love for dressing up and hair styling into a career. Raised in a devoutly religious family, Hardy was planning to "rededicate her life to Christ" at the time of her death, Carolyn Hardy said.
And she was planning to marry Thomas, whom she had met the previous year.
Thomas "was a good-hearted person and he didn't bother nobody," his mother said. "Everybody liked him."
Thomas had worked as a groundskeeper for the city and was doing odd jobs at the time of his death. He spent most of his life in the West End neighborhood where he died.
"He always hung down there," his brother, Eric Thomas, said. "He liked hanging around the stores down there because that's where all his friends were.... . He just loved life."
Although they were suspicious about Hardy's death from the beginning, her family members say they always believed the truth would come out in the end.
"I said, 'Lord, I know my sister was murdered,' and I knew the Lord was going to bring something out of this," Carolyn Hardy said. "We just gave it to the Lord and let him work it out.
"And he did."
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshots) 1. Hardy. 2. Thomas. color. 3. ERIC BRADYby CNBTHE ROANOKE TIMES. Relatives of Barbara Hardy, who was killed in a
fire two years ago, include sister Marlena Hardy (from left) and her
daughter Marquisha Hardy, mother Gracie Calloway, sister Carolyn
Hardy and sons Jont, kneeling, and Jarad. KEYWORDS: FATALITY