Kentucky House Fire

[Zenyatta]

 A Kentucky mother who lost two of her three childen in a house fire has posted on Facebook that she is at peace with God's plan. (It's a video so these words are not verbatim.)  The woman is in shock, I'm sure. A third child is in critical condition.

I think this mom doesn't realize what has happened, which is why she has been able to calmly post several times on Facebook.  

I am absolutely not criticizing this woman.  The horror of it all is unimaginable. 

I think the couple belongs to the kind of rural church that hosts the Rodrigueses, which made me start thinking about churchgoers and preaching and missionaries and such.  

Because I have never had this kind of faith, I am mystified about it. 

 

[TheOneAndOnly]

That does sound like shock. Any more info on where this happened?

[Zenyatta]

Two videos that the mother took of herself talking about God are no longer there.  The things she was saying are what startled me. 

2 minutes ago, TheOneAndOnly said:

That does sound like shock. Any more info on where this happened?

The mother's name is Christin Henry.  I guess it's okay to say her name because the story has been on the news.  I hope she has that kind of unshakeable faith.  

[TheOneAndOnly]

https://www.tristatehomepage.com/news/local-news/ohio-county-mother-shares-message-from-hospital/1300069414

That's maybe a county west of where the Nauglers live. In the video in the link above she sounds shocked but also like she's afraid of anyone thinking she's upset. The "I don't want anyone to think I'm bitter. I'm not bitter." I'm thinking that if she doesn't let herself grieve she WILL be.

Another link with a video this time more about the community offering help. https://www.tristatehomepage.com/news/local-news/support-for-henry-family-arrives-as-mother-shares-message/1301593451 

Sounds like she has genuine faith. I hope it comforts her because she's in the middle of living through a nightmare.

[TheOneAndOnly]

And apparently Jill Rodrigues  showed up to the funeral, because the universe loves insanity. smh

[littlemommy]

35 minutes ago, TheOneAndOnly said:

And apparently Jill Rodrigues  showed up to the funeral, because the universe loves insanity. smh

And she live-streamed it. And took a beaming selfie with the grieving parents.

[zeebaneighba]

Oh my fucking god!  I should know by now that there is no bottom with Jill!

[JermajestyDuggar]

Head on over to the Jill Rod thread for more info. It is absolutely appalling. 

[unsafetydancer]

I had to stop reading the Jill thread because of stuff like this. It was starting to damage my view of humanity.

[TheOneAndOnly]

There's a gofundme for the family that as of right now hasn't quite reached it's goal if anyone wants to help.

https://www.gofundme.com/p368d-help-the-henry-family

[LookieLoo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhnsdeTlfaY&feature=youtu.be

I don't understand. How can you lose 3 children so suddenly and horrifically only TWO months ago and already be on the speaking circuit? How can she talk about those poor babies and not be bawling her eyes out? I guess I just don't get all of this. Is she putting on a brave face because that's what her uber conservative faith tells her she has to do? If so, that's pretty messed up. 

[wild little fox]

I think it's part her religious beliefs and part denial. She seems so disconnected from the reality of what happened. 

[Georgiana]

46 minutes ago, LookieLoo said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhnsdeTlfaY&feature=youtu.be

I don't understand. How can you lose 3 children so suddenly and horrifically only TWO months ago and already be on the speaking circuit? How can she talk about those poor babies and not be bawling her eyes out? I guess I just don't get all of this. Is she putting on a brave face because that's what her uber conservative faith tells her she has to do? If so, that's pretty messed up. 

Grief is a strange animal.  Not only does everyone process it differently, but everyone also processes it on a different timeline.  The shock of something like this might last for months or even years.  It was so wholly unexpected and so incredibly devastating, that her mind might very well be refusing to let things "set in".

I think that likely she needs MEANING right now. She needs a reason WHY the fire happened, WHY she lived when her babies died, and WHY  God would do something like this to her.  My therapist said to me many times that what is often the hardest part about grief is the senselessness of it all.  That's what people struggle to process: the fact that we have this great loss, but there's no reason for it.  No meaning behind it.  It's just loss.  

For her right now, giving the tragedy meaning or a purpose is probably going a long way in helping her process what she went through.  Talking about it to supportive communities may be helping her work through it.  Widening her circle of support may be giving her access to additional resources that she truly needs to move forward.  

I would never tell a person to handle their grief this way, but if she's finding it's helping her keep it together during this time, then heck...go for it.  

[LookieLoo]

I don't know. I think by using this tragedy as a way to promote a higher spiritual purpose or a "testimony", it will make it all the more devastating once the reality of what happened finally sinks in. I don't think she's been given time to process. She's just immediately in super spiritual mode, and I bet she feels a lot of pressure to perform. Hearing her dad speak is illuminating. Not in a good way.

[TheOneAndOnly]

And now John Henry has been in an accident with a drunk driver. I think he has a broken leg? I couldn't find much information on it other than comments on Christin's facebook.

[AmazonGrace]

Everybody handles grief differently but I gotta say the people who think it would be a good idea to invite recently bereaved families to give motivational speeches at their events seem a little ghoulish and abusive to me. Hopefully it's motivated by faith more than, "this horrific tragedy is going to make our event more interesting"

[littlemommy]

If anyone follows the Naugler thread, the Deb/Sally from Blessed Little Blog has turned their Sauron-eque eye of doom toward the Henry family. There's a post on them and the insinuation that more will follow.

 

[SecretIdentity]

First time commenting on here, I found you all in a google search. The only other place to talk was on topix and those threads keep getting taken down. 

I'm not sure Christin is showing any signs of grief, I know you all say grief is different for everyone, but i have never seen glee as an appropriate response to the death of your children

[Pecansforeveryone]

@SecretIdentity, welcome to Free Jinger. Where has Christin shown glee? (Please and thank you.) I can not reiterate enough that Christian isn't surrounded by a healthy, functional culture. She is fundie. She has almost certainly been taught to place herself last as a sign of sacrifice for Christ. Being angry or sad for to long is seen as questioning God's will and giving a bad testimony for Christ. Being angry at God is unfathonable, as is secular counseling. Fundies are commanded, "to count it all joy" and "rejoice in the Lord always." It's an enormous burden on a good day, let alone your worst nightmare. 

[TheOneAndOnly]

I probably came off as slightly demented at a funeral once, since I was sleep deprived plus trying out a new-to-me antidepressant at the time, but it was the funeral for an older relative that had been sick for a long time, and I wasn't posting about it online. I'm not sure what's going on with Christin since I don't follow her facebook, but it's certainly got Dildo Debbie (BLH) worked up.

[formergothardite]

18 hours ago, SecretIdentity said:

'm not sure Christin is showing any signs of grief, I know you all say grief is different for everyone, but i have never seen glee as an appropriate response to the death of your children

Welcome. I haven't read everything about her, but I am going to give her a pass on having emotions that seem "off". People react differently and she is dealing with a loss that is of a magnitude that is hard to grasp.  I do know that I giggled hysterically through the funeral of my brother, not because I was happy, but because I was so upset and was pretty much losing it. I'm fairly sure people judged that. 

When reading the fire report is seems like she was sleeping in the same room with the children and wasn't able to get the door open to get them out. I do wonder if the children moved away from her in panic and that is why the husband found her but not the kids right by the door. 

The only thing I give her the side eye over is when she told the fire department that she waited till the dryer stopped drying clothes before she would clean the lint out of it. I thought it was fairly common knowledge that not cleaning your lint filter would cause a fire. To regularly wait to the point that the dryer could no longer dry clothes is just bizarre to me. The dyer was running that night and I wouldn't be surprised if that is what caused the fire. 

I don't know anything really else about her. I do know that Jill Rodrigues was a total stranger whose goal was to use this tragedy to get more attention for herself, so that picture was of her being ambushed by Jill, not a selfie with friends. 

[LookieLoo]

On 11/13/2018 at 8:33 AM, formergothardite said:

When reading the fire report is seems like she was sleeping in the same room with the children and wasn't able to get the door open to get them out. I do wonder if the children moved away from her in panic and that is why the husband found her but not the kids right by the door. 

I read the fire report too, and her account of what happened doesn’t make sense to me. Like, why couldn’t she get the door open? She was inside, and isn’t that what an outside door is for? To be able to exit? Unless there was something wrong with the door prior to this that prevented it from opening. 

Christin also commented on the blog in question and says that when she couldn’t get the door open, she resigned herself to being trapped and went back to the bedroom to “lie down and die with my babies.” Super odd that she didn’t try harder to get her or her kids out. Which means her husband would not have found her by the door but back in the bedroom.  If she did pass out as stated, I wonder if the kids panicked and tried to escape on their own, which is why it might have been hard to find them.

I don’t know what to believe. Family members have given conflicting reports about the location of the kids (such as one saying the oldest girl was on the couch while Christin says all three were in the bedroom with her). I don’t think what we’ve been told is the whole truth. I’ve wondered for awhile if there’s negligence that’s being covered up. Hey, not cleaning your lint trap or having working smoke detectors is negligent in and of itself. But beyond that, more along the lines of Christin and/or her husband not being in the trailer when the fire broke out. 

[formergothardite]

20 minutes ago, LookieLoo said:

, she resigned herself to being trapped and went back to the bedroom to “lie down and die with my babies.” Super odd that she didn’t try harder to get her or her kids out.

 That she totally gave up and just laid down to die is odd especially since her husband didn't find her in the room, he found her by the door. Did she take the children with her to the door? Did she leave them in the room? I'm sure it all happened extremely fast and with a lot of confusion, but I can't imagine just giving up when a door wouldn't open. I wonder if the heat from the fire warped the door frame and that is why she couldn't open it. But it doesn't seem like there would have been that big of a drop if she had grabbed the kids, busted out a window in the bedroom and dropped them out. Of course, she might spend every single day thinking these things and feeling guilty. I do wonder if she is is some deep, deep denial about everything and that is why she seems this way in the brief glimpses we see. There is no way she is getting real help in that church environment and being in denial might be the only way to cope right now. 

I am still stunned that she waited till the dryer was no longer drying to change the lint filter. 

I think it is best she has made her FB private. There was no good going to come from keeping it public. 

[LookieLoo]

8 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

 That she totally gave up and just laid down to die is odd especially since her husband didn't find her in the room, he found her by the door.

But did he? His account (from the fire report) seems to indicate he found her passed out by the door, but her account indicates she went back to the bedroom and then passed out. 

So that's why I wonder if the kids left the bedroom on their own after she passed out. Otherwise, he should have found them all together. 

Or maybe this isn't the truth of what happened. I found her resignation to being trapped and ready to die so inconsistent with what a typical person faced with this situation might do. You'd think your adrenaline would be pumping and you'd do whatever is possible to batter through that door, open a window, whatever. It would have made more sense to me if she said she tried to open the door but couldn't, so she went back to the bedroom to find something to break it down or escape through the bedroom window, but blacked out before she could attempt to.

[Aine]

I haven't read the fire report and am only just learning about this family but one thing I will say is that trauma does some crazy things to a person's memory. I can't imagine the panic and confusion upon waking up (so already not that alert) to your house on fire and then adding in the noise of a fire and the heat and not being able to see for the smoke and darkness and then likely the noise and movement of the children at the same time. She may have not been able to open the door to the room due to the heat of the door knob or the pressure on the other side of the door from the fire (it's very difficult to open a door into a raging fire).

Then if they took her statements immediately following when she and her husband were both being treated in hospital and Ireland was still fighting for life and she was likely struggling with immense guilt and trying to make sense of what happened herself? I think some statements not lining up might be expected.

If there is something 'off' with the sequence of events, hopefully the authorities are investigating that. But I can't imagine losing your three children, you also grappling with the trauma of it all and trying to piece your snippets of memory back into a coherent whole, and then people wondering if maybe you're lying.

I've been reading a lot lately about the forensics of fire. Basically, many scientists are finding out that everything many people have thought they knew about fire is not correct. It's now becoming apparent that there have been people put to death through capital punishment already or currently sitting on death row that have been convicted on questionable science. A lot of people imagine what they would do in a house fire situation but some of the science coming out has shown that that may not be possible (e.g. opening certain doors, even smashing certain windows etc) and that the smoke and the fumes coming from the many materials that make up your things and your house can very much mess with someone's ability to think rationally.