After the fire
Angela Jones picked up her daughters from their first day of school. Marissa, a bouncy, energetic 5-year-old, had started kindergarten. Sydney, 9, was eager to get home and tell Jones stories about school. Yet normalcy stopped for the Jones family as Angela turned onto North Vista Road. Firetrucks and police cars blocked the way. Jones’ rental house belched thick, black smoke into the late summer air. Jones ran toward the house, distraught. She thought her friend, Mike Wagner, was still inside.
Sydney Jones said she can still remember every terrified word her mother said in those first minutes. Wagner was fine. Everything else was not.
“Where do I go from here?” Jones said she thought at the time.
It’s a question the 29-year-old Jones hasn’t found an answer to nearly four months after the fire destroyed their possessions and killed their pet guinea pig and a bird.
Last week, Jones’ ex-boyfriend was sentenced to nearly two years in prison for setting the Aug. 31 fire. A few hours after the blaze had been put out, James Dean “JD” Swearingen admitted to starting the fire. He told a fire investigator he trashed his girlfriend’s bedroom, emptied the contents of a gasoline can inside and set the house ablaze with a cigarette lighter.
“I cannot describe to you the effect (the fire) has had on me and my children. Seeing my children’s looks of fear and then hearing their cries as they stared at everything they knew being destroyed is the hardest thing I ever had to face,” Jones wrote in a letter to Spokane County Superior Court Judge Greg Sypot.
A tumble of events followed over the next days. Grief, anger, gratefulness, despair, hope and fear swirled through their lives, at times threatening to consume them just as heat and water had taken everything they owned.
The family did not have renter’s insurance. They moved into a hotel room.
Word of the fire spread quickly through the West Valley community.
Jones, a West Valley graduate, got calls from old friends she hadn’t seen in years, offering help. Strangers called to find out if she needed furniture. Much of their hotel room filled up with piles of donated clothes.
Jones’ co-workers at Rockwood Clinic’s nephrology department donated sick time so Jones would have time to look for a new apartment. They also set up a fund for the family and coordinated donations. Spokane Valley firefighters and folks from the girls’ school at Otis Orchards Elementary gave them gift certificates. Dishman Dodge offered to pay their first month’s rent and security deposit.
Jones said she’s cried many times out of gratitude for the support she received from the community.
Yet the fire haunted the family.
The girls were scared. Jones was rejected from one rental application after another. Donated money went to pay for the hotel room.
Jones was broke when a month after the fire she moved her kids into a small two-bedroom apartment near Balfour Park that didn’t do background checks on tenants. Co-workers came over to help her clean the filthy walls and move in the donated furniture.
“There’s good days and bad days,” Jones said during a recent interview in the living room of their apartment. “We’re doing well, all things considered.”
Jones sat on a donated couch. Everything in the room, including a computer, was donated.
Yet Jones hopes to a find place with a yard with a swing set. She wants to be in a neighborhood where she doesn’t have to worry about going outside after dark and stumbling into a drug deal.
Swearingen’s sentencing was a difficult time. Jones learned the prosecutor had agreed to let him plead guilty to attempted first-degree arson and that they would ask for a one-year sentence.
Jones was outraged. There was nothing “attempted” about the arson, Jones said. The house had to be taken down to its foundation, there was so much fire damage.
Wagner, who was in the basement when the fire started, remembered going in the next morning to see if there was anything to salvage. The basement where he’d been staying had water on the floor. Upstairs, the fire had burned through the walls. A couch was reduced to blackened coils of metal.
Judge Sypolt agreed with Jones that the sentence was too lenient and upped it to 22 months in prison. After getting out of prison, Swearingen will have community custody and will undergo treatment for alcohol abuse. Court records said Swearingen was drunk when he started the fire, something which Jones and Wagner say is not true.
Swearingen declined a request for a jailhouse interview on Tuesday.
Jones said she thinks Swearingen’s sentencing has brought closure to the family’s four-month ordeal. The girls used to talk about the fire every day. Now, they talk about it less, although Sydney still plugs her ears sometimes to block out talk about the fire. And occasionally they all end up piled in the same bed, scared.
Jones wants to start a completely new chapter in her life.
She wants it to have a happy beginning.
Wagner, the friend who Jones worried was trapped in the basement of her house, helped her get through the hard days after the fire. The friendship deepened, and the two recently began dating. Wagner, 22, has been a calming influence, Jones said.
Wagner, Jones, and the two girls cut down a Christmas tree together. It sits in the corner, a plain tree with few ornaments, but with the promise of a good end to a nightmarish year.
“It was a fire – a tragedy – but so much good has come out of it. We’re a family,” Jones said.