It’s here that Crutchfield lived with her 15-year-old daughter Jaycelyn in one apartment. In the other lived Crutchfield’s son Nicholas and her nephew Jason Kuhn, along with niece Libby Kuhn and her boyfriend Daniel Snider.
According to Crutchfield, she was asleep on the morning of Dec. 19 while Jacelyn was getting ready for school. At around 5:45 a.m., Jacelyn texted her mom asking, “What smells like burning plastic?”
When her mom didn’t respond, Jacelyn went to wake her.
“She came out into the living room where I was sleeping and said, ‘Why is it hazy?’” Crutchfield recalls. “I first thought it may be an incense or something, but then realized we needed to get out.”
Crutchfield said she ran to the other apartment, just steps from her own front door, to wake up the rest of her family. At this point, Jacelyn could see black smoke pouring from a vent in her room.
“I said, ‘Hurry, get the animals and get out!’ And by the time we got to the stairwell, the black smoke was coming through the wooden stairs from below,” Crutchfield said. “We just had to run through it to get outside.”
While everyone was able to safely exit the building, once outside, Snider realized two of his and Libby’s animals were unaccounted for.
“When they first said there’s a fire, I grabbed a shirt and ran outside without my shoes or anything,” Snider said. “Once I realized Shiloh was still inside, I put the shirt on and ran back in.”
Snider was able to save Shiloh, Libby’s beloved 12-year-old Border Collie mix, but said her cat, Toriyama, had darted away out of fear.
“Your instinct just kicks in and we’re so thankful he was able to get back out, but I would warn others not to go back in for their pets like that,” Crutchfield said. “The upstairs was full of black smoke and it was not safe. It could have turned out so differently.”
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
The Franklin Fire Department said last week that the fire does not appear to be suspicious, but noted an investigation is ongoing.
The total cost of the damage is still unknown, as is the future of the building, though Crutchfield said she does hope to rebuild.
“They lost everything,” said Virginia Pipes, Crutchfield’s sister and mother of Libby and Jason Kuhn, who has since been helping her loved ones slowly rebuild their lives. The family celebrated Christmas together less than a week after the fire.
“I was just so happy to have everyone here and safe,” Pipes said.
Most of the family escaped the fire without shoes or socks, leaving behind everything they owned — cherished mementoes, electronics, photos, lifelong collections, and every day necessities like clothing and hygiene items, all gone in an instant or damaged past repair.
“It sucks to randomly remember something and be like, ‘Oh, I lost that,’” Jason said. “That keeps happening because I still haven’t fully realized everything that’s been lost. It does not feel good.”
One silver lining in the tragedy, Crutchfield and Pipes highlighted, has come from the numerous people and businesses that have stepped up to help in more ways than one.
“The community has been amazing,” Pipes said.
Just minutes after the fire department arrived on the scene that morning, Crutchfield said she shared news of the fire on Facebook.
“I posted to make sure people knew that everybody got out safely,” she said. “But then someone told me to open the trunk of my car and people just started driving up and putting food and water in, and things like shoes, socks and clothes.”
Despite the ongoing struggle to grasp how much has been taken materialistically, the family remains in good spirits, with acknowledgement of how much more could have been lost.
“It’s like when you run a red light on accident and you almost get hit; that feeling of shock just hits you constantly,” Crutchfield said. “If we had taken even 30 more seconds to get out, things could have ended so differently.”
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