Sifting through the ashes
Alecia Warren | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 12 years, 9 months AGO
<p>JEROME A. POLLOS/Press Cheryl Sutton stands outside the mobile home Monday where she was renting a room in when a fire destroyed the residence early Sunday morning trapping a four-year-old girl inside. The girl's father was able to break out the window and rescue the girl with Sutton's assistance.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - Cheryl Sutton didn't find much on Monday as she picked through the debris around the boarded-up mobile home on North Francis Street, the day after the home was ravaged by an early-morning fire.
"It's a total loss in there," Sutton said, adding that the only item to survive in her room was a lamp.
But what was important, she acknowledged, was that she and the other residents were all alive and uninjured, after she helped her roommate, Glenn Meachem, rescue his trapped 4-year-old out of her room as the fire raged.
"He was really brave," Sutton said.
Sutton, who has rented a room for about a month at the Coeur d'Alene mobile home where Glenn and Kristen Meachem live with their daughter, Keeara, said the family is fine and currently staying with relatives in town.
Glenn, who has asthma, was briefly hospitalized for smoke inhalation, she added, but was otherwise unharmed.
She is searching for a place to stay, she said.
"I had to call work and tell them I don't have a work uniform," she conceded with a chuckle, adding that she works at Burger King. "I'm sure I will find something."
Members of the Meachem family couldn't be found to comment on Monday.
Sutton said she had accompanied Glenn around 12:30 a.m. on Sunday morning to pick up a friend who was stranded downtown.
On their way back, they received a frantic call from Glenn's wife. The mobile home was on fire, and she couldn't get to Keeara's room. There was too much smoke to see, and the doorknob too hot to turn.
It all happened "in the process of us being gone 15 minutes," Sutton said.
They made the drive home "a lot faster," she said. When they arrived, flames 4 feet high were coming out of the window.
"All I could think about was Keeara," Sutton said.
She and Glenn removed the screen door from his daughter's window and busted the glass, she said. They placed a blanket across the bottom of the shattered window and Sutton pushed Glenn up and through. He grabbed Keeara and emerged with her unharmed, but for a bleeding lip.
It took 25 firefighters from Northern Lakes, Kootenai and Coeur d'Alene fire districts to contain the fire on Sunday. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Sutton said she isn't sure what the family's next step will be.
"Everything they own was in there," she said. "But it's all replaceable."