Posted on 03/16/2006 5:36:30 AM PST by FerdieMurphy
A toppled candle destroyed the home and belongings of an out-of-work nurse and her 10 children
During the late-afternoon confusion, a candle flame grew Monday into a potentially deadly blaze in the home where Kerren Laitaille had been raising her 10 children.
In a matter of minutes, the fire destroyed family pictures, most of their clothes, beds, just about everything they owned. Everything, that is, except their faith.
“It’s shown me I’m blessed with my kids and shown me people do care and are there for you,” Laitaille said Wednesday morning in her all-too-temporary home: a room at Hawthorn Suites in North Naples.
After the fire, the Collier County Red Cross set her up in the plush hotel room for three days, and the hotel offered an additional day at its own expense. That gave Laitaille, a 34-year-old out-of-work nurse and single mother, until 11 a.m. Friday to find a new place.
She doesn’t know what she will do when check-out time arrives. Her old home, which she rented, is no longer inhabitable.
In the meantime, her children, who range in age from 5 months to 15 years, have been watching television and playing video games to pass the time. Those who are old enough to go to school can’t because they don’t have a change of clothes.
For her part, Laitaille has been living in a controlled state of anxiety. Reading the Bible, she said, has kept doubt from consuming her the way the fire raged through her Golden Gate house.
Like most fires, this one started small.
Someone, perhaps one of the younger children, accidentally upended a candle in the master bathroom. The flame must have landed on or near a clothes basket because it spread quickly, said Victor Hill, a spokesman with the Golden Gate fire department.
A pungent odor filled the house at 5280 20th Place S.W. When Laitaille opened her bedroom door to see what was the matter, she encountered a wall of flames. She hollered for everyone to get out.
One of her sons, 13-year-old Derrick St. Claire, guided the others to safety, displaying remarkable calm.
“First, I had to get the small ones out,” the boy recalled Wednesday. “Then, I had to get the girls out, and then the rest of the boys out. Then we had to dial 911. We had everyone out of the house and safe.”
Golden Gate firefighters received the call at 5:55 p.m. and arrived at the house three minutes later, Hill said. Smoke poured from the eaves of the roof, making the house resemble a pot of boiling water with the lid still on top. The fire would go on to cause $50,000 in damage, Hill added.
Within 10 minutes, the fire was under control, but Laitaille’s life was spinning in the other direction.
A neighbor she had never spoken to before would turn out to be what Laitaille later called a “guardian angel.” The woman, a single mother of five children herself, tried to calm a disconsolate Laitaille and urged her not to re-enter the burning home.
Barbara Bekich, 38, stayed with the family for three hours in front of their ruined home as firefighters finished putting out the fire and concluded their investigation. She raided her children’s closets to give the family clothes and brought them diapers, Pop Tarts, water and Cheezits.
“Really,” Bekich said of Laitaille, “she needed a hand held.”
More help came when the Red Cross gave the family a $400 debit card to help replace clothes and other items lost to the fire. Laitaille said Wednesday she hadn’t used the card yet because she thought it hadn’t been activated.
But Jerry Welty, emergency services director for the Collier Red Cross, said it was ready to use when he handed it to her. Laitaille and her family were one of three families the Collier Red Cross has helped after fires during this week alone, Welty said.
Welty said he couldn’t remember the agency ever dealing with such a large single family. The suite the charity rented for her has three king-size beds and a pull-out sofa.
Laitaille, a native of the Bahamas who moved to Miami at 7 years of age, decided from an early age she wanted a big family. That way, each child would have someone to rely on and be relied upon. She was once engaged to be married to the man who fathered eight of her children, but he moved back to the east coast instead.
Since her van broke down two months ago, she has been unable to work as a private nurse and has been living on child support. A family friend this week put up the money to rent a van for her to get around.
Welty said that since the Red Cross only offers short-term help, he hoped another charity would step in by the end of the week to help the family find housing.
Laitaille, who grew up in the Baptist church, has turned to her faith to ease her frayed emotions. On Tuesday night, she read the comforting Psalm 23 seven times.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” it reads. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. ...”
Having an open flame (burning candle) in a house full of kids doesn't imply a good grounding in common sense either!
Maybe she was sleeping. I'm exhausted with only eight children!
The candle in the bathroom was definitely poor thinking, under the circumstances, though.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;"
"Apparently he maketh her lie down in a lot of other places too."
ROFL
If this "nurse's" IQ even approached room temperature, I'd be amazed.
Since the Bible has been her only book she could have spent more time memorizing the Ten Commandments.
I don't believe it. She probably lays around with the kids watching Jerry Springer where, on occasion, she might see someone even worse off than herself.
Really, here is a bus schedule for her, I am sure the $15 monthly pass is cheaper than gas for her.
http://www.colliergov.net/transadmin/atm/operations/cat/index.htm
I find it hard to believe that in the blue hair capital of the world, there wouldn't be good public transportaion or lots of opportunities to make very good money in nursing. When a woman makes 10 babies and chooses to not be with the father, then she better do all she can to provide for them.
R.N.'s in my area earn an excellent salary, and there are always advertisements in the paper from hospitals and medical practices looking for more nurses. I strongly considered nursing school when my husband was unemployed a few years ago, but he found a new job before the-baby-at-the-time was old enough for me to look for work or more training.
This "mother" gives every non-believer another reason to run from God. IMHO
Bull.
The Salvation Army or Goodwill or some other social welfare agency would have clothes for the kids in a heartbeat.
Slut! I have no sympathy for her, just hatred. I do have sympathy for taxpayers who have to slop the hogs because of our government's encouragement to freeloaders to keep being freeloaders through social welfare programs.
*snicker*
We who don't like this situation ar trying to mention some choices that could be made. So maybe there is not public transportation. (there's not, I just checked)
But there are CHOICES she could have made and could be making that we wouldn't have to pay for by force. I for one would help her out, if I knew her, as a fellow Christian. One of those ways I would LIKE to counsel her about is sleeping with men and bearing their children without benefit of marriage.
Another would be about personal responsibility.
That being said, she's doing well with her children, it sounds like. She's not a worthless mom that doesn't care, like so many. I would like to help her, but not just to hand over money, but to give her a leg up and help her find self sufficiency.
I'd hate to be the one checking into that suite after these folks were finished with it.
Roughly. My pay ranged from $8 through $12 an hour, depending what I could arrange with agencies and per-diem work. I did have a full merit scholarship at Brown, which helped, and I had some student loans, which I finished paying off last year.
Did you pay childcare and other expenses for ten kids on that?
Nix on the childcare; Laitaille's oldest is 15, which is plenty old enough for baby-sitting duties. If she works on staff, and even for some agencies, she can get medical coverage in that way. Clothes she can get from the goodwill, just like I did when I was a kid.
So the single biggest expense for the kids is food. I'll bet you $1,000 that their typical meal isn't (1) oatmeal, (2) brown beans, or (3) rice-based. That's what I grew up eating, and you'd be surprised how cheaply you can get beans for eleven people.
But were you really trying to say that it's impossible for the woman to survive at all?
Her youngest is 5 months old. She may still be on maternity leave. THough it sounds like she's spent much of the last 15 years on maternity leave!
10 kids??? I am disgusted. This woman needs to be given the stupidity of the decade award for having 10 FREAKING KIDS!?! I feel sorry they lost everything in a fire, I have had that happen and it sucks, but not that she is trying to figure out how to take care of 10 kids. With no 'baby daddy' around either?
You misunderstood me. I'm not the one who flatly declared that she should take a bus. I mentioned at least four possibilities: public transport; carpooling; bumming rides off co-workers; and walking. There are many, many more possibilities: she could get a loan to fix her vehicle; get a loan and replace her vehicle; go through a string of cheap clunkers; hitchhike; pay a friend a couple bucks a week for a ride; etc. So my point wasn't that "she should take the bus"; my point was, "where there's a will, there's a way."
That isn't jumping to conclusions. That's heaping scorn on people's willingness to declare themselves utterly helpless.
I grew up in a Connecticut suburb where there was NO public transportation. My dad sometimes walked and sometimes hitchhiked, but usually he drove a clunker we got for $100 or so and rode into the ground. I can't count the times that I've been stranded by the side of the road; when I was seven I was made to ride in a car we were towing with a rope, so I could push the brakes whenever I saw brake-lights. When I was five I knew what to do about a flooded carb, a stuck valve or a bad starter motor. I can't remember when I first learned to start a standard by popping the clutch--I could barely reach the pedals. Yet my dad made it to work--usually to two or three jobs.
Tell me about it! I wasn't on it myself, but a sister in my church signed up for assistance for her children, when her deadbeat husband decided to move for the umpteenth time and she refused to uproot the kids yet again... the case worker was flabbergasted that she didn't plan on divorcing him, and urged her to reconsider. He pointed out the great welfare benefits that she could only get if she had no husband. It's a disease.
Anyhow, the food stamps are worth a lot. There is the medical. The cash for two adults was 200 dollars a month. They do not help with utilities or rent unless it is at the eviction or turn off stage.
There is subsidized housing, of course. I knew an older fellow in upstate NY who got somewhere in the neighborhood of $600/mo in food stamps alone. He was living with a woman, also on welfare, and they refused to marry because it would cut their benefits. (I don't remember if $600 was their combined total, or only his share.) He ate much better than I ever did, I can tell you that.
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