LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — When FOX5 first reported on a house fire near Lake Mead and MLK Boulevard, fire officials reported six people were displaced.
Those six people were all related, spanning four generations.
“My Vietnam veteran grandfather-in-law and his beautiful wife… my mother-in-law, my two kids and my soon-to-be husband,” Abigail Knott, who lived in that house on Eleanor Avenue, listed as the people she lived with. “And our six dogs.”
Knott’s life is now completely up in the air.
“We lost everything,” she said in the aftermath of the fire. “We lost everything. Like, everything. There’s nothing that’s salvageable right now.”
Knott’s mother-in-law rushed over from housesitting for another family member when she got a frantic call about a fire at her home.
“I get here to see my family on the curb crying,” Celia Lucero recalled. “My grandbabies crying. My dad… he just had heart surgery, and him just looking so depressed and sick.”
Knott is trying to be a strong mother for her two kids.
“I don’t know how to explain to a four and six-year-old that our lives are gone,” she lamented. “All those pictures of our deceased loved ones, my uncle’s ashes, my father’s ashes.”
Those memories are all now lying with the ashes of much of their house.
“My four-year-old, every day since it’s happened, has been sick to her stomach,” Knott said. “They asked if they could find grandpa’s ashes.”
Meanwhile, the children’s great-grandfather is struggling without his medications, which were burned in the fire.
“He has shrapnel through his body going through the war, and he’s gone through a lot,” Lucero said about her father, who she says earned two Purple Hearts in Vietnam. “He’s a very strong man. He’s the rock of our family. It’s hard to see our rock hurting and on a curb and doesn’t have a home to go to.”
The family is staying at an Airbnb while they try to get their life together, thanks to some help from the Red Cross of Southern Nevada. All six of them and all six of their dogs were relatively unharmed in the fire.
FOX5 has reached out to Las Vegas Fire and Rescue about the cause of the fire and was told they’re still looking into it.
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