After resisting arrest and setting his home on fire, Daniel English is in jail, but left behind him is a trail of burned belongings and burned bridges.

“It’s a horror story, a nightmare,” Mindy English said.

Mindy, English’s wife, is now living with her mother in a trailer adjacent from what was her home before Daniel destroyed everything inside.

According to Mindy, when you walk into the home now, the first thing you notice is the burnt curtains, which she said look straight out of a horror movie. The whole living room is destroyed, all the furniture turned to charcoal.

“You can’t touch anything without turning black,” she said.

 When deputies arrived at the home on the evening of Aug. 27 to arrest Daniel on a pair of out-of-county warrants, he hid in the home, shouting threats before pouring gasoline inside the Trumble Creek Road home and setting it on fire. He was eventually apprehended with the use of a Taser when he fled out the back door.

One silver lining came in firefighters’ successful rescue of Mindy’s mother’s dog, found in the back of the trailer, nearly dead from smoke inhalation. The use of a specialized pet oxygen mask enabled the feat.

Lost in the fire, however, were a pair of four-month-old kittens. The first was found by Mindy’s mother, a tiny boy kitten that Daniel supposedly loved more than anything, Mindy said. It was a couple days before the second one was found.

“The day I came home and pulled up the apron on the bed and found my kitten, I broke down,” Mindy said.

In fact, Mindy has spent very little time in the trailer, which belongs to her mother, since the fire.

“I’m not emotionally able to yet,” she said. “I was raised in this house. There’s a lot of history in this house. Even my mom, to go in there and see what he has done to her home she has had all these years, just depresses her.”

Mindy also said when Daniel started the fire, he destroyed her 16-year-old son’s bed.

“When he adopted my child they had a standing ovation, and then he burns his... his everything,” she said.

The incident was not the first caused by Daniel’s anger. Mindy said the family is scared of Daniel, afraid for their safety. She said she was hiding when the deputies confronted him Tuesday evening.

“For some reason he just snapped,” she said. “There have been threats before, but you never want to believe that someone you love is capable of doing this.”

Mindy did take advantage of her unfortunate situation to try and get a message out to other women to help them avoid ending up in the position where she now finds herself.

“I just want it to be stressed to all the women out there that have gone through the violence and harassment that you’ve gotta speak up before it’s too late,” Mindy said. “I’m hoping one day I’ll be able to understand, but right now I don’t because I thought that he loved me. But how can someone love you and burn everything?”

So far, English has received some clothing from friends and family, but is in need of everything from food and water to furniture. Donations can be brought to English’s father’s house, located at 3237 U.S. 93 South.