Arkansas - Five children among six dead in mobile home blaze

Associated Press | April 20, 2005

[HAL9000]

HUMPHREY, Ark. (AP) -- Five children were among six people who perished when fire destroyed a mobile home Wednesday evening, state police said.

State police spokesman Bill Sadler said authorities on the scene had confirmed that at least six were dead.

"Five of them appear to be children of various ages," Sadler said. "One of the fatalities appears to be an adult female."

Children in the neighborhood reported that other youngsters, in addition to those whose bodies were found, may have been in the home when the fire occurred shortly after 6 p.m., Sadler said, but that could not be confirmed.

"A search is under way, based on witness accounts, (for the bodies of) other children that may have been in the mobile home," he said.

Sadler said no additional bodies had been found as of about 9:30 p.m., but the search would continue into the night.

He said the sheriff's office in Jefferson County had dispatched an emergency command center with outdoor lighting powered by a generator that would be set up to allow the search of the debris to continue "at least for the next few hours."

No names or ages of the victims were available Wednesday evening, Sadler said.

Sadler said the children apparently were not all from the same family. He said state police, the Arkansas County sheriff's office and Humphrey police would investigate the possibility that the home might have been serving as a day-care center for children.

A neighbor, Virginia Beliew, confirmed that a woman who lived in the mobile home "kept some children" for others during the day. Beliew said she did not know the home's residents well, and knew none of the children who were at the home when the blaze began.

The blaze was reported to the Humphrey Volunteer Fire Department at 6:08 p.m., Sadler said.

"According to the first Humphrey responder, the trailer was engulfed in flames upon his arrival," Sadler said.

Britney Hanson, 17, who lives nearby, said she was among the first on the scene.

"There were flames four or five feet up, the whole trailer was in flames," she said. The heat and flames were so intense, she said, that a small camper trailer parked next to the mobile home also caught fire.

She said she tried to console the parents of some of the children in the home who arrived before the fire was out, and had to restrain them from entering the house while it was still ablaze.

"They were saying, 'My babies, my babies,'" Hanson said.

Some of the children who stayed at the house were of pre-school age, Hanson said. "There's usually a lot of children playing around there, and most of them were pretty young," she said.

Sadler said the bodies of all the victims would be sent to the state Crime Lab in Little Rock for autopsies.

Humphrey, a town of about 800 people, sits astride the Arkansas-Jefferson county line about 40 miles southeast of Little Rock.

Officials of the Humphrey School District said classes were canceled for Thursday.

In 2000, four Humphrey teenagers were killed in the collision of a train and a car as the teenagers returned to their school at the end of a lunch break.