2nd time not the charm for family

By Scott Shenk

Published: May 18, 2008

As he hurried to get ready for his friend to pick him up for work, the 35-year-old University of Virginia carpenter noticed that Zeus was not guarding the children’s bedroom doors.

An ever-protective border collie, Zeus always stood early-morning guard outside the side-by-side bedroom doors of Jason and Vicki Hamshar’s three children.

Not Monday morning.

Jason knew something was wrong. He thought he smelled smoke, so he checked throughout their duplex on North Berkshire Road in the city.

Finding nothing, he thought he heard a noise coming from their neighbor’s and put his ear to the bathroom wall.

Was it a smoke detector?

He went outside and looked through the windows of his neighbor’s front door and saw the kitchen filling up with black smoke and heard the detector blaring.

Not again.

Fatal fire

In 2000, Jason and Vicki were a young couple with three children — 5-week-old Alexis, 22-month-old Caelan and Andrew, 3.

On the afternoon of Nov. 22, everything changed.

Andrew and Caelan were playing upstairs in the old Fluvanna County house. Jason was downstairs with Vicki, who was breastfeeding Alexis.

Andrew had gotten hold of a lighter, and he started a fire that spread quickly.

Jason tried three times to make it upstairs to the toddlers, but the overpowering smoke forced him out of the house.

Investigators said that after the fire started, Andrew and Caelan hid in a closet, where they died.

The house and all the Hamshars’ possessions were lost as well.

The community and Jason’s large, local family rallied around them, and they eventually got their lives back in order.

But the pain of losing their children lingered.

“It took me a long time to accept the fact that I survived, because for a long time I felt I shouldn’t have,” Jason said.

Alexis was key to her parents making it, they said.

“Loving her kept me from going flat-out insane,” Jason said Thursday, standing outside the uninhabitable duplex he and his wife rented.

2nd fire, bad memories

As smoke filled the neighboring residence in the duplex on Monday, Jason ran into his home, woke Vicki and the children — Alexis, now 7, Jason, 4, and Peyton, a 23-month-old girl — and they got out, along with Zeus and their other dog, Oreo.

He pounded on the neighbor’s doors, but no one came out until police arrived.

That’s when a man who occasionally stayed in the home with their neighbors broke out a front window and screamed for help.

“My heart sank when I saw his pale face,” Jason said.

Police officers helped the man out. He was treated at the UVa Medical Center and released, according to officials, who said the fire likely started in the kitchen, but they have not determined a cause.

The family who lived next to the Hamshars was not home when the structure caught fire and could not be reached for comment.

As they stood watching firefighters battle the blaze, Jason and Vicki, 31, who just Friday earned her nursing degree from Piedmont Virginia Community College, wondered what they would do now, homeless again.

The tragic fire of 2000 surged back into their minds.

“When the smoke started coming out of the windows, I started crying,” Vicki said Thursday.

“I didn’t remember too much of that week” in 2000, Jason said. “I’ve been remembering too much of it this week. … I was almost done with the nightmares, waking up in the middle of the night.”

Unlucky, but blessed

Joyce Moore can’t believe her nephew’s family has lost two homes to fire.

“What they have been through is unbelievable,” she said. “My mind can’t grasp it.”

The same goes for Britt Grimm, deputy chief with the Charlottesville Fire Department, which responded to the fire.

The 34-year veteran firefighter tried to recall if he’d ever seen a similar situation.

“Off the top of my head, no. So it’s safe to say it’s rare,” he said.

The Hamshars are homeless for a second time in seven years. They lost almost all of their possessions, including furniture, clothes and some of their children’s favorite toys.

The seeming impossibility of it is not lost on the couple.

“Like my aunt was telling me, if they had an unlucky lottery, you should enter,” Jason said.

Still, they know it could have been worse.

“After our first experience, it’s easy to feel blessed. All my babies are here, my dogs are OK. Photos, too,” Jason said.

Moving on

The Hamshars are staying with his mother in Scottsville and slowly regrouping.

The local American Red Cross helped the family initially.

But, for the long term, Mavis Dickerson, a program support tech with UVa, has set up a collection for the family.

“It’s hard,” she said. “I can’t imagine.”

Jason and Vicki’s chief concerns are getting back into a home and establishing some form of normalcy for the children.

Little things help, such as keeping Alexis in her elementary school so she can finish the year. Peyton still has her two favorite blankets. And Jason used money given by the Red Cross to buy a miniature golf club and balls, though he still misses his Transformer and Superman posters.

“Kids, they’re resilient, they get over things quickly,” Vicki said.

But being a family drawing only one salary is tough, they said. Plus, they had no renters insurance.

The donations should help. As should the fact that Vicki has a job offer to be a nurse at UVa hospital, and Jason’s co-workers donated leave time so he can help his family re-establish.

Like their children, Jason and Vicki are trying to be resilient.

“We were gonna move this summer,” Jason said Thursday. Now, he added with a shrug, they’ll just have to do it sooner.