Two children die and mum badly injured in blaze
A BOY of three and a sevenyear-old girl have died after a fire ripped through their family home.
Issac and his sister Sienna are understood to have died from smoke inhalation minutes after the blaze took hold.
Their 35-year- old mother Jade Horton suffered life-changing injuries after jumping out of one of the upstairs windows to escape the inferno on Thursday morning.
Miss Horton’s partner, stepfather to the children, raced round to the three-storey terraced home minutes after the fire took hold at 7am.
The 46-year- old suffered minor injuries when he tried to get inside the house to save them.
Last night police said the likely cause was an electrical fault in a first-floor bedroom, but added that Christmas lights were not to blame. Officers said that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the blaze.
Second and third-floor windows in the house in Eynesbury, a district of St Neots in Cambridgeshire, were completely burnt- out with the rooms inside blackened. The guttering had melted.
Neighbour Charles Cooper, 30, said: ‘The flames went up fairly swiftly. They were coming out of the top window. It took a good three or four hours before the smoke abated.’
Another neighbour, Peter Kellythorn, 40, smelled burning when he woke on Thursday morning. ‘There was smoke billowing out from the back window,’ he said. ‘The heat – it doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s just awful. We hoped everyone had got out.
‘They’re fairly new houses and they’re all fitted with fire alarms and things.’ Miss Horton, a former prison custody officer who now runs two children a cleaning are company, believed and to have her moved into the house recently.
Her heartbroken sister Nicky said last night: ‘We are unable to say anything about Jade’s condition because we just don’t know.’
Neighbour Simona Bagnato Ogbeni, 39, has launched a fundraising internet page to support the Strickland, family of chief the victims. fire officer Chris of Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: ‘ Crews fought tirelessly to get the fire under control and locate the children who they had been told were still in the house. It’s one of the toughest incidents you can attend as a firefighter.’