"I can't believe that this was my son's room," Andrea Stephens said as she shot video inside her fire-devastated home.
Stephens had just finished preparing for the school week Sunday, when she decided to take a nap at about 10:30 a.m.
She awoke to something tugging at her. But instead of seeing someone there teasing her about lying down, the mother of four saw flames.
The fire started on the first floor of the Brooklyn Avenue home, that is in the middle of wood-frame rowhouses, Fire Chief Scott Evans said. It then extended to the second floor, where Stephens had been napping.
The smoke was choking her.
"I began to panic, trying understand if I’m dreaming or what," she said.
Stephens was home alone. Her youngest sons, ages 6 and 3, had spent the long weekend with their grandparents. Her 20- and 16-year-old sons were out.
Blinded by the thick smoke, she felt her way around to the window, which she had to pry open past a nail that stopped it midway, she recalled.
As she got onto the roof, fire shot out at her from her bedroom window, forcing her to jump.
"That fire stripped me and my children of everything we had to our names except for the clothes we were wearing that day," she said.
"It's my heaviest devastation yet," Stephens told BreakingAC.
And she has been through some things, including being shot several times inside a Carver Hall apartment in 2015.
“I thought I was going to die,” she testified at the trial of the man later convicted of 10 counts, including attempted murder.
She opened her own business in February 2020, but was forced to close two months later due to COVID.
Stephens has been back to the house, but has been too afraid to venture to the second floor, where she almost slept through the fire.
Anyone will to help can go to the GoFundMe page:
