Mom, children forced to flee burning house

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In the space of five minutes, Kezia Figaro went from working on her laptop to rushing her three children out their family home as it burned.

Standing along Tarouba Road, Marabella, confused by the disaster, Figaro said she and her husband lost everything they worked for, to make a home for themselves and three children, ages 19, six and five.

Reports stated that a fire broke out at the upper level of the two-story house. Mon Repos firefighters responded and extinguished the blaze before it spread to the apartments on the ground level. However, the fire already razed Figaro’s home.

Figaro, 38, a social media marketing consultant, said she was working when her 19-year-old daughter called out from the kitchen, alerting her to a fire in her bedroom. Figaro said there was a small flame near her bed when she entered. She and her daughter filled mugs and buckets to extinguish the fire, but as the smoke filled the room, Figaro sent her younger children to the back step.

“I went back to the living room to get my phone to see if I could call my husband. I did not get my phone, so I end up running outside. I took everybody out because, by that time, the house filled up with smoke.”

As they stood outside, the fire spread rapidly across the house. She said there were no open flames in the bedroom and the only thing plugged in was a printer and her Alexa device. Figaro said there was nothing she could think about that caused the fire. She surmised that it spread quickly after the PVC ceiling began to burn.

“Right now, we lost every single thing; my computer, the kids’ devices that we just bought for school, all our clothes. We could not take anything. My children had laptops because they are doing school online. Their laptops are gone, the computer that I would use to work from home is gone; my daughter, who is in university, her computer is gone, so I do not know what to do.”

Fire officers are yet to determine the cause of the fire.