Boy, 5, sister, 8, and mum die in inferno
Father ‘serious’ after blaze rips through home
A FIVE-year-old boy has lost his fight for life after being pulled from a devastating house blaze that claimed the lives of his mother and sister, police revealed yesterday.
Harvey Collison died along with his eight-year-old sibling Izzy and their mother Justine, 33, after flames tore through their four-bedroom detached house before dawn on Saturday.
Their father Gavin, 34, was in a serious condition in hospital last night after being rescued.
The children’s grandmother, Diane Fletcher, 53, who had been visiting, escaped unharmed. Neighbours alerted by explosions and an ‘orange glow’ from the conservatory battled to force their way inside but were beaten back as the flames took hold.
It is unknown what caused the blaze but neighbours feared it might have been ‘candles or Christmas lights’.
Yesterday, residents of the small Nottinghamshire village of Collingham, near Newark, told of their horror.
‘It is completely awful,’ said Rachael Walker, 48, who used to look after Harvey at the village’s pre-school and lives 50 yards away. ‘They were just such a lovely family. It is a closeknit village and I think this will hit the community really hard.
‘They were involved in the local football club. I was there yesterday and people were in tears.’
She said it would be an ‘incredibly difficult’ week for pupils at John Blow Primary School, which both children attended. She described Harvey as ‘a real character, a really jolly little boy’.
The couple are understood to have moved into the £350,000 house from a nearby property around 18 months ago and were doing it up.
Mrs Collison, originally from Devon, worked at a special needs school as a teaching assistant, and neighbours said her husband was a civilian engineer at an RAF base.
Cath Hardy, 58, a colleague of Mrs Collison at Kisimul School in Swinderby, Lincolnshire, arrived at the scene to lay flowers.
Fighting back tears, she said: ‘You couldn’t meet a nicer woman. She adored her children and husband, idolised them. As for Gavin, he’s lost his wife and two children. His world has been taken away.’
Paul Norton, 57, described seeing a ‘glow’ from the house around 7am on Saturday. ‘It looked like the conservatory was on fire,’ he said. ‘There was lots of smoke.’
He and his son Elliot, 20, dashed over and banged on windows before trying the back door as the first fire crews arrived. ‘There was too much smoke and the door handles were hot,’ he said.