Wife burnt to death, son crushed by a truck– the man surrounded by ‘accidental tragedies’

Tragedy struck on New Year’s Day in 1991 as flames rose high up into the Sierra Nevada skies from a former gold miner’s shack at the foothills of the mountains.The home of the Karlsen family, in Murphys, California, was ablaze.

In the chaos of the smoke, Karl Karlsen had managed to rescue his three young children – his two daughters and son, Levi. But Karlsen’s wife, Christina, 30, was trapped in a bathroom behind a securely boarded-up window that she couldn’t break through.

The heat was too fierce for Karlsen to go back in and she perished in the fire in the house she’d lovingly made a home. Young mum Christina had died of smoke inhalation as she’d cowered terrified in the bathtub with only a washcloth over her mouth for protection.

It was a tragedy that would haunt the community.

The fire had seemingly started because of a string of very unfortunate coincidences. Karlsen, who worked for Christina’s dad’s air conditioning and heating business, explained his wife had broken the bathroom window a few days earlier, which explained why it was boarded up with plywood from the outside, preventing her escape. She’d also left a jug of flammable kerosene in the hallway outside the bathroom thinking it was water – which had been accidentally knocked over. Then a faulty electric light had been placed too close to the carpet, which ignited the blaze.

Firefighters ruled the fire accidental and Karlsen faced life as a single parent. Luckily, just 19 days before the house fire, Karlsen had taken out a life insurance policy on Christina that paid him $200,000. The widower was able to use the money to move back to his hometown in Varick, New York, buy a house and start his life again. Seemingly, Karlsen was so broken with grief, he didn’t even wait for Christina’s funeral – he left after the fire. A year later, Karlsen met Cindy Best and they married in 1993. Cindy felt enormous sympathy for the man who had been forced to watch his wife die in such a horrific way. She cared for Karlsen’s children and they went on to have a son. They built a new life together on a quiet detached farm. But then tragedy struck again 17 years after the fire that claimed Christina.

In 2008, Karlsen’s son Levi, then a 23-year-old divorced father of two, was doing a favour for his dad on the farm, looking at an old Chevy pickup truck that needed some repairs. It was November 20, and Karlsen and Cindy were at the funeral of a relative. When they returned, they found Levi crushed under the fallen vehicle. He’d been working underneath the truck that had been propped up with a jack. The front wheels had been removed and with no safety blocks supporting it, when the jack had broken, it had crushed