DEADLY FIRE
KILMARNOCK, St Elizabeth – A pregnant woman, her elderly mother and her 10-year-old niece were yesterday morning burnt to death when their three-bedroom home in this farming community went up in smoke.
Verona Johnson, who was said to be in an advanced stage of pregnancy, had saved her eight-year-old son, Deneil Stewart, and her sister Angella Johnson, from the blaze and had gone back into the burning building to try and rescue her mother and her niece, but never made it back out. She was trapped by the huge blaze and with her mother, Francella Johnson, 80, and niece Britannia Robinson – a Grade six student of the Kilmarnock Primary School – was consumed by the fire.
The brave Verona Johnson had returned home from Grand Cayman just hours before the deadly fire, which the police yesterday theorised was caused by an electrical short circuit.
According to the police, about 4:45 yesterday morning the five occupants were at home when they were alerted by the smell of smoke, after which it was discovered that the house was on fire.
The pregnant woman managed to haul her sister and son from the blaze. But, as she attempted to repeat her heroics she got trapped in the fire.
One unit from the Black River Fire Station managed to put out the blaze, but not before the three were burnt to death as the fire quickly consumed the house.
In what was described as a horrid scene, eyewitnesses recounted how the charred remains of the three were removed from the smouldering rubble.
One man shuddered as he described how the scorched body of Johnson was removed, with the head of her foetus peeking out.
Yesterday, the loud squealing, seemingly hungry pigs penned in a sty nearby the smoking wreckage, the burnt frame of a motor car, smoke-blackened zinc – from the flattened room where pig feed was stored – heaped on the ground and the shell-shocked look etched on the faces of bystanders summed up the grim story of the tragedy.
Among the several persons outside the premises which was cordoned off by police tape was Britannia’s dad, Ralston Robinson, who was a picture of devastation.
“My only child; I don’t know the reason why. Me and me daughter was so close that some of the time me have to wonder if she responsible for me or me for her.
“Last thing she told me on Sunday is, ‘Daddy, when I get big I am going to buy you a car and I am going to build you a big house’. And all of those dreams gone,” Robinson said as the tears flowed freely down his cheeks.
At the same time, a distraught Lurline Johnson said she could not believe when she was called at her home in Old Harbour and told that her mother, sister and niece were killed in an early morning fire.
“I just woke up to send my little boy at school and my sister called me to say that our mother’s house was burnt down. So we just come down here to see what is going on. Me can’t explain because me never expected these things to happen to my mother in her old age,” a grieving Lurline Johnson told the Observer.
The atmosphere was similarly mournful at Britannia’s school where a team of counsellors from the Ministry of Education’s Region Five visited to give of their support.
“She is always ready to assist the other students, a very confident child. At the moment we are in a very sombre mood,” said a sad principal of the Kilmarnock Primary School, Icelin Blackwood.