Early morning blaze kills four

LITTLE ROCK — Firefighters found four bodies in a southwest Little Rock house while extinguishing a blaze about 1:30 a.m. Friday, police said.

The bodies were transported to the Arkansas Crime Laboratory for autopsies and positive identification, police said. An investigation is underway.

The Little Rock Housing and Neighborhood Programs department was on the scene at 4800 Greenfield Drive shortly after firefighters and police cleared the area.

The crew boarded up the house for the neighbors’ safety and put a large warning notice on the garage door.

Neighbors Destiny and Clifton Barnum were the first to see the fire and call 911.

“I was sitting in the kitchen, she heard the dogs barking and she said, ‘What are they barking at?’ Then she looked at her phone and got the notification on the camera, and she said, ‘The house is on fire!’” Clifton said.

Destiny said by the time she made it to the curb, Clifton had run across the street to see if he could help, but the fire was spreading fast.

“It was not a slow spread at all, all the way up in the trees, it was almost to the house that’s behind it, the flames had gone over into the grass. If they would’ve got here any later, it would’ve been a lot worse than what it was,” she added.

Destiny only noticed three people living in the house since she moved into the neighborhood a few years ago — an older man, his wife and a young man she assumed was their son.

The father seemed to be on a work schedule of leaving the house at 4:30 a.m. in the morning and returning at 10 p.m. at night, she noted.

“They stayed to themselves,” she said. “You didn’t see them too much or see any commotion or anything out of the ordinary. He would ride the mower, cut the grass and go back in the house.”

Clifton said that when the fire blew out the windows, it sounded like someone was inside throwing things around the house.

“You had to be out here to hear the windows busting out and the power lines popping,” Destiny said. “It was back to back to back to back.”

The two never expected to go outside and see anything like what they did.

“It definitely hurt my heart,” Destiny said. “To find out that four people were in there and lost their lives.”

By the time they saw the growing fire, it was too late for anyone to go inside to try to help, Clifton added.

“I could hear the sirens coming but the closer they came, the bigger the fire got,” Destiny said. “It was never a chance for anything to be saved.”

The couple agreed they couldn’t go back to sleep after seeing the fire, and their children in the house were “devastated, screaming and crying.”

“After his anxiety cleared up a little bit and he thought about it and we came back in the house,” Clifton said, referring to his son, “he said ‘Hey mom and dad, you know what? I just realized, you guys are heroes; you guys took action and called 911 and went to check on them,’ and I was like, ‘Wow.’”

Destiny said she was afraid the three cars in the driveway would explode because of the size of the fire.

Clifton said the Fire Department happened to come right before the flames reached another house.

“The lawn mower, all the stuff back there was on fire. It was very close,” he said.

Glen Johnson, the Barnums’ neighbor, said the residents seemed like nice, quiet and hard-working folks.

“You never know what people are going through; it’s one of those classic things, you never see it coming until it happens,” he said