He then charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire. One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water at the blaze.
A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.” Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”ĭiane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. He broke another window flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window.
He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children-Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber-were trapped inside. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.īuffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas.
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