The strength of love’s memory
She was the wife of a Granite Mountain Hotshot and, one summer night, saw her world torn apart. But in the months that followed, she would be lifted up — by the lessons of her husband, the arms of family and a promise from a friend.
ROXANNE
THE THREE MEN CAME IN the middle of a pitch-black summer night, traveling across the desert on a dirt road west of Tucson.
Their headlights illuminated a towering saguaro, its thick arms splayed wide and protective. It looked like a warning: Stay back.
But they left their cars at the gate, lifted the latch, slipped through and quietly closed it behind them. They walked in silence toward the house, which sits on 4 acres dotted with scrub, mesquite and paloverde. The next-closest house was a pin- point of light in the distance.
One of the men, Dan Klement, looked up. He had lived in these parts for 25 years, yet had never been this far out. It was peaceful. A crescent moon had risen maybe 20 minutes earlier. The stars went on forever.
Some other night, any other night, Klement might have paused to gaze at the constellations. He would have found Polaris, the North Star, and maybe the Dippers. He might have traced over to Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and the Little Bear. But this was not a good night. Inside, Roxanne Warneke sat straight up in bed, her heart
pounding. She could hear someone walking around outside. Maybe more than one someone.
It was just before 1 a.m. The dogs were barking like mad. And her husband, Billy, wasn’t home; he was a firefighter working halfway across the state.
Scrap, the couple’s black-mouthed cur, bolted out back through the pet door. The other three dogs rushed into the living room at the front of the house.
Roxanne got her handgun and followed the dogs. Her sister burst out of the next bedroom at almost the same time.
The area is a travel corridor for illegal immigrants from Mexico. Neighbors sometimes talk of home invasions, or of Border Patrol agents chasing people across their property in the dead of night. There was a knock on the door. Roxanne looked at her sister quizzically. She thought, “Do home invasions start with knocking on doors?” “Who is it?” she called. “Fire Department.” And Roxanne knew. She looked at her sister and said it out loud.
“Billy’s dead.” WILLIAM WARNEKE — BILLY — was one of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a wildland-firefighting unit based in Prescott. He would text Roxanne on most mornings and tell her where the crew was headed, and she would Google it: Where was the fire exactly? How big was it?
At the end of the workday, back in the crew’s buggy, Billy would text again to say that they were finished and that he was headed back in.
The summer had been one fire after the next. In the last half of June alone, the hotshots had worked the Doce Fire near Prescott for eight days, the West Spruce Fire on June 28 and into June 29, and made a stop at the Mount Josh Fire that same day on their way back home.
At night, Roxanne and Billy would talk on the phone. She missed him but would see him soon. She was planning to drive up after work on his next day off, June 30.
That Sunday morning, though, Billy texted her and said not to come. The hotshots were being sent to a fire on Yarnell Hill.
Roxanne went to the computer. A lightning strike had started the fire Friday night. She read an overnight report that said it had burned 100 acres. The weather forecast was typical: hot and dry, a chance of storms. “Easy-peasy,” she thought. But by late Sunday afternoon when she got home from work, the skies over Tucson had turned dark and the wind had kicked up. Her phone beeped with a weather alert, a dust-storm warning.
She went outside to look. “It looked like a dust storm from the Middle East,” she said. “You couldn’t see anything, and then behind it was rain. I was like, ‘Rain, you need to catch up.’ ”
Roxanne went back in and checked on the fire; it had accelerated, burning nearly 5,000 acres. She clicked over to a weather map and watched radar of the winds over Yarnell.
The storm outside was throwing dust against the sliding-glass door; the dogs had come inside and stayed.
“Keep Billy safe out there,” she prayed.
It was about 4:30 p.m. THE 9 P.M. NEWS GAVE ROXANNE reason to worry: There had been multiple firefighter deaths at the Yarnell Hill Fire.
“All of a sudden, I felt like I had ice water dumped on me,” she said. “I just started shaking.”
Roxanne called Billy’s cellphone; the call went straight to voice mail. She called his captain, Jesse Steed, and then his supervisor, Eric Marsh. Those calls went to voice mail, too.
She got no answer at Station 7 in Prescott, the hotshot crew’s home base. She called the number for the Red Cross that was running across the bottom of the television screen.
“I’m Billy Warneke’s wife,” she choked out.
The person took her name and phone number. Someone would call her back. Someone did, later, but couldn’t offer any information.
Maybe the news was wrong. There were so many conflicting reports. Sixteen were dead. No, it was 21.
Roxanne called Billy’s older brother, Fred Warneke. Fred was in the Navy, stationed in San Diego. She knew he could handle the uncertainty — and what might come. Then, she called her mother. Don’t worry, her mom said. “He’s fine. Just pray that he’s fine.”
Maybe it hadn’t been Granite Mountain, Roxanne told herself. Or maybe Billy hadn’t been with the crew.
Maybe he had gone back to the buggies for more water.
But he hadn’t texted or called at the end of his shift. He always did, almost exactly 12 hours after it started. Always. And 13 hours had passed.
Roxanne paced the room, the TV on, the dogs still, watching her, back and forth, back and forth.
She sent Billy three texts, then stopped. His phone would be flooded with texts from family and friends who had also seen the news. She knew he would be mad at himself for making her worry. Fourteen hours. Tired from worry and from work that day at the Aveda store where she was an assistant manager, Roxanne got into bed after watching the top of the 10 p.m. news. In the darkness, she kept telling herself that Billy was fine.
“If it was Billy, I would have heard. If it had been Billy, someone would have called.” GOLDER RANCH FIRE CAPT. DAN Klement was president of the North Tucson Firefighters Association and well-connected. All evening, he had been getting phone calls from fellow firefighters. What had he heard? Was it true?
About the time Roxanne was going to bed, Klement got another call, this one from Tim Hill, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona. He was in Prescott.
Yes, Hill confirmed, there were 19 men dead. One was from nearby Marana. Hill needed someone to go to the home and tell the firefighter’s wife. Would Klement do it? It was a name Klement didn’t recognize. It would be a 45-minute drive to an address in an area he didn’t know. And it was a duty no firefighter wants: to be the one to devastate a spouse, a family.
“You’re the last person on Earth they want to see,” he said. “You’re the biggest nightmare in their life.”
Klement left his house, drove the block to the fire station and put on his dress uniform. The dark jacket and trousers, the gold buttons and stripes, the white shirt and dark tie, the hat, the badge. He tracked down Chief Randy Karrer and a Pima County sheriff’s deputy to go along.
Of course he would do it. ROXANNE PUT THE HANDGUN down on the windowsill inside before she opened the door. The dogs pushed outside ahead of her, surrounding and sniffing the men.
She stepped out onto the front porch in bare feet, wearing Spider-Man boxer shorts and a tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
She looked so young, Klement thought. “I almost asked if her mom was home,” he said later.
Klement asked if they could come in. She shook her head. No.
Roxanne was stone-faced. When your husband is a firefighter, three men will tramp through the desert to knock on your door at 1 a.m. for only one reason.
Then, Klement noticed the swell of her belly. He thought, “Please don’t let that be a baby bump. Please don’t be pregnant.”
She was. Almost four months along. KLEMENT DIDN’T KNOW WHAT to do with his hands. He wanted to reach out and touch the woman, but her arms were crossed.
So, there on the doorstep, under the soft glow of the porch light, he told her that her husband was one of the 19 firefighters killed. As he talked, the chief stood on the step just below him, the deputy on the ground. Neither moved.
Roxanne stared at the ground. She didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t cry.
Klement can’t recall his exact words. He felt outside himself, like it was someone else doing the talking.
In 22 years as a firefighter, Klement had been on many calls where someone had died, maybe from a heart attack or in a car accident. But never before had he notified a firefighter’s family.
Billy was one of his own. All 19 were his own. In bearing the news of this death, he felt the weight of them all. Roxanne was just still. Klement looked miserable — and she was glad. She hated him.
For coming here in the middle of the night with a tale of terror.
For saying the words out loud that made it real.
She only looked up when Klement finished talking. “What now?” she asked. “Is there anyone with you?” Klement asked, nodding toward the house.
My sister, she answered. Maria, 24, had moved in when Billy left for Prescott to start his job with the hotshots in April. He didn’t want Roxanne doing things like lifting heavy bags of dog food when she was pregnant.
Could Klement speak with her, he asked.
Roxanne nodded, opened the door and closed it behind her. There was silence, and then a sound that hit Klement like a blow to the chest.
Roxanne was sobbing, the sound clear and piercing even through the door.
The three men looked at each other, then down at the ground.
Maria stepped out onto the porch. Klement asked if there was anyone he could call. She gave him her mom’s number. Inside, though, Roxanne was already calling her.
“They’re here, Mom,” she choked out. “Who’s there?” her mom asked. “The Fire Department.” Then, only sobs.
Roxanne’s mom kept her daughter’s voice pressed against one ear with her home phone and answered her cell, listening to Klement in her other ear.
“You hold onto hope until the very last second,” said Roxanne’s mom, who also is named Maria. Then, you have to let go. Klement and the other men waited outside for Roxanne’s parents, Maria and Brook Wilcox, to get there. They don’t live far, 9 miles by road, about half that as the crow flies.
And they waited for the two counselors from the victim-response team to arrive. After that, there was nothing left for the men to do.
It was about 2:30 a.m. Roxanne had never let them in. Klement understood. But before he left, disappearing back into the dark desert, he told Roxanne: “Believe in the fire service, that we’ll never turn our back on you. We’ll be there for you no matter what you need.”
It was a promise.
BILLY
AT 16, BILLY WARNEKE WAS A class commander in JROTC at Hemet High School in Hemet, Calif. One of his cadets was 15-year-old Roxanne Lopez.
Billy asked her to the JROTC ball; she said no, they were just friends.
They each went, just not together. But a friend took a picture of the two of them that night. Billy’s arm thrown around her shoulders, Roxanne’s cheeks pink with embarrassment.
He was the only boy who had ever made her blush.
They began dating. Roxanne thought he was sweet and a little goofy. But then, her family moved to Tucson in 2005 when she was 17.
“She was heartbroken, but she was not a drama queen,” her mother said. No one thought too much of it. They were just kids, after all.
In one state, Billy graduated from Hemet High in 2005 and enlisted in the Marine Corps. In another, 421 miles away, Roxanne graduated from Saguaro High in 2006 and enrolled at Pima Community College.
Through friends from high school, Roxanne heard Billy had been assigned to the 1st Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., and had deployed to Kuwait, then to Iraq. She connected on MySpace with his half sister, Victoria Purkey, who got a message to Billy. He called Roxanne soon after.
It was the summer of 2007, and the conversation came easily. They laughed a lot. In the months that followed, they got to know each other again in texts, e-mails and more calls.
That December, Billy came to Tucson for three days to see Roxanne. He was young but old-fashioned in a way, she remembers. He formally asked: “I want you to be my girlfriend. Would you?”
She told him no. She was unsure about a long-distance relationship. And Billy was about to leave again, this time to Okinawa, Japan.
But four days later, back at Camp Pendleton before he left, he asked again over the phone. This time, Roxanne said yes. “He was very persistent,” she said. From Okinawa and then Australia, Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar, Billy would e-mail and Roxanne would e-mail back. They would arrange a day to talk on satellite phone and she would wait for the call, sometimes until midnight because of the time difference.
Sometimes, the connection was bad, and Billy could hear Roxanne but she couldn’t hear him, or vice versa. When that happened, one of them would talk while the other listened. Pressing a button once to make the phone beep meant “yes,” twice meant “no.” If something was funny, they both pressed a lot of buttons at the same time, laughing in a burst of beeps.
Roxanne found herself really listening to Billy, since she couldn’t interject or interrupt. She didn’t have to think about what she was going to say next. She got lost in the stories he told her, imagining the people and places in her head.
By August 2008, Billy was back at Camp Pendleton and came back to Tucson to visit Roxanne. While there, he got a voice-mail message from his gunnery sergeant, who needed volunteers to go to Afghanistan. It would be voluntary because his unit was so recently returned from a deployment.
Billy said he thought he might go; Roxanne began to cry.
He later called his gunnery sergeant back and turned down the assignment. JUST A FEW DAYS AFTER BILLY left Tucson, Roxanne was already missing him. It was she who asked the big question, over the phone: “So, when are we getting married?”
Billy didn’t hesitate: “How about December 30?” That was the date a year earlier when they saw each other for the first time since reconnecting.
He was 21; she was 20. They were young but certain.
“When you find that person, you immediately know, ‘This is the person I want to spend the rest of mylife with,’ ” Roxanne said. “And when you are apart, all you want is to be together.” ROXANNE AND BILLY WERE married at the Pima County Courthouse in downtown Tucson on Dec. 30, 2008.
Their mothers were their witnesses, with other family members gathered around. Everyone went to eat afterward at Pinnacle Peak Restaurant.
Neither had wanted a big wedding. It would be a waste of money, really. (Instead, they would use the money to spend a week in Yosemite National Park when Billy got out of the Marines the following year.)
Roxanne wore a royal-blue dress — she thought white was kind of cheesy — and made Billy wear a blue tie, even though he hated ties.
Her grandmother teased that the tie was so if he tried to run away, Roxanne could grab him by it and pull him back.
ROXANNE
AFTER KLEMENT AND THE others left that first night, Roxanne crawled back into bed. Her mother lay down with her and stayed, rubbing her back and talking. She never fell back to sleep.
When it was light, they went to her mother’s house. Roxanne curled up on the couch leaning against her, staring and crying as Maria talked on the phone, one call after another.
Her grandmother came over, resting her hand on Roxanne’s head, murmuring soothing words in Spanish.
Food had no taste, not even her mother’s albondigas soup, one of Roxanne’s favorites. She could hardly swallow.
Roxanne didn’t want anything. Only Billy.
The only person she could bring herself to talk to on the phone was Billy’s brother Fred, though neither said much. They mostly sobbed together.
Billy was one of five children, the middle between two sisters and two brothers, and was closest to Fred. They had been in JROTC together, and Billy followed Fred into military service. Fred said he was on his way. That morning was a Monday, July 1. Relatives of the hotshots would gather at a closed meeting at Mile High Middle School in Prescott to get more information. But Roxanne could not leave her spot on the couch, curled next to her mother.
Billy had a great-aunt and -uncle
who lived in Prescott. After Billy took the hotshot job, he stayed at their house, Roxanne insisting he pay rent because he could eat so much food.
On Tuesday, Roxanne and her parents drove to Prescott to see them. Fred was there, too, as was Billy’s father, Harry Warneke.
The house seemed too crowded. One moment, Roxanne wanted to be around people; the next, she wanted to be alone. She stumbled numbly through, listening to people talk, accepting hugs, nodding.
They drove back to Marana on Thursday for a doctor’s appointment the next day. It was the Fourth of July, Roxanne’s favorite holiday. She yearned to be watching fireworks instead of talking about autopsies and funeral services.
Roxanne’s doctor talked gently to her about how stress affects pregnancy. She had lost weight, just a little, from not being able to eat.
“I had to think more about eating and drinking and sleeping. I had to eat because of the baby,” Roxanne said.
Because now, it was up to her, only her, to take care of their baby. She would have to find the strength. THE FIREFIGHTERS’ BODIES had been taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office in Phoenix for autopsies.
On July 7, a week after they died, the hotshots were returned to Prescott in a motorcade of 19 nearly identical white hearses. The procession left Phoenix at midmorning, pulling out under an American flag hanging from an arch made of two firetruck ladders.
Escorted by first-responder vehicles and motorcycle officers, the procession slowly made its way 100 miles north over the next few hours. Along the way, other firefighting companies and hundreds of people lined the roads in a show of respect.
When the vehicles came into view in Prescott, Roxanne saw that in the window of each hearse was the name of the firefighter it carried. The 19 names together were so familiar now that they had almost developed a rhythm. First came Eric Marsh, the crew’s superintendent, and then their captain, Jesse Steed. The next four hearses carried the permanent members of the unit: Travis Carter, Clayton Whitted, Robert Caldwell, Travis Turbyfill.
And then came the seasonal hotshots in alphabetical order. Roxanne watched as each passed by. Andrew Ashcraft. Dustin DeFord. Christopher MacKenzie. Grant McKee. Sean Misner. Scott Norris. Wade Parker. John Percin Jr. Anthony Rose. Joe Thurston.
Billy would come next, after Thurston and before Kevin Woyjeck and Garret Zuppiger. Roxanne steeled herself. “I was trying to keep my legs strong,” she said. Don’t buckle. Stand straight. Next to her, she felt Billy’s dad and then his brother sag. William Warneke. Roxanne forced her legs to stay straight. A COMBINED MEMORIAL service July 9 in Prescott overflowed an arena commonly used for concerts and sporting events. Near the end, each firefighter’s mother or widow stood to accept a folded American flag, a bronzed Pulaski tool and the International Association of Fire Fighters gold Medal of Honor, given to families of firefighters who die in the line of duty.
Roxanne got shakily to her feet and stood by herself. Then, her family and Billy’s rose from their chairs, almost 40 strong, to stand with her.
BILLY
AFTER BILLY GOT OUT OF THE Marines in 2009, he studied fire science at Pima Community College and began training to become a firefighter. Roxanne was in training, too. She had applied for the U.S. Border Patrol.
Both jobs required muscle and stamina, and Billy and Roxanne were natural training partners. When they ran, he let her set their pace but would carry a backpack with a 90-pound bag of sand inside to make his run more difficult.
“He totally ran circles around me,” Roxanne said, smiling. Really, he did, urging her to keep going.
He had been like that in the Marines, too, she said. If someone stumbled, Billy would take that person’s gear and run beside his comrade. He was just 5 feet 6 but strong, his legs so muscular he had to wear wide-legged pants. He kept his T-shirt tucked in always, even during strenuous training. It was a habit carried over from the military.
Billy could leg-press 800 pounds, 12 repetitions at a time. Sometimes, when he did pull-ups or push-ups, Roxanne would climb onto his back, an extra 110 pounds, the side of her face next to his or buried in his back.
“You can do it,” she’d tell him, or tease, “Don’t be a pansy.”
She was no pansy, either. She was pretty and petite, just 5 feet 1. But she was tough, and Billy pushed her to be even tougher.
“He was a good coach,” Roxanne said.
As Billy coached her in the gym, Roxanne tutored him in the kitchen. If he was going to be a regular firefighter one day, she told him, he should know how to cook. Firefighters take turns at the station making meals.
She taught him how to follow a reci- pe and the differences among mincing, dicing and chopping. He taught her how to shoot, first rifles and then handguns. He was an avid hunter and wanted Roxanne to know how to protect herself.
Together, they poured over Billy’s firefighting textbooks. Roxanne edited his papers and quizzed him for exams. She learned how weather and terrain changes fire behavior, about fire-suppression agents and strategies, command operations and functions.
When they would cuddle on the couch to watch a movie about firefighters, Billy would critique it for realism. If a character caught on fire and ran screaming into the street, he would say, “Tss. That’s not what happens.”
Billy earned his fire-science degree in 2012 and began studying construction. One day, he was going to build Roxanne a house. His first goal, though, was to work for the nearby Northwest Fire District, which has 10 fire stations in the northwest Tucson area and its own wildland crew, the Ironwood Hotshots. But Northwest had no job openings just then.
So, he tried out for the Granite Mountain Hotshots in Prescott, a Type1 crew, meaning it could travel the nation as one of the best. Hotshots must meet rigorous fitness standards: be able to hike, rappel or drop by helicopter into remote areas and live for days, even weeks, with only the equipment they carry. The seasonal job would be excellent training — and it would look great on his resume.
As Billy learned more about wildland firefighting, so, too, did Roxanne. She learned how a fire could reverse itself in a moment, pick up speed quickly and suck all the oxygen out of the air.
Firefighters carry emergency shelters for worst-case scenarios. Billy kept his tucked into a pocket of his backpack near his hip. But although the thin, heat-resistant tentlike shelters offer some protection, Billy told her, they can’t withstand direct flames or extreme heat, at least not for any length of time.
“If I ever have to use this,” he told Roxanne, “I’m not making it. Basically, what this is for is for the family to have something to bury.”
Marines are required to draft wills and financial plans before each deployment in case they are killed in the line of duty. Billy understood what it meant to be prepared.
“The way I see it is if I die, I die,” he told her. “I hope it will be quick, and my spirit will float up and I’ll say, ‘Huh, there I am.’ ”
Before he started work with the hotshots, Billy showed Roxanne where he kept his documents and his military medical records, including dental Xrays.
“If anything happens, they’ll want these,” he told her.
“No way,” Roxanne said. “You’re being paranoid. Nothing is going to happen.”
“You have to be prepared,” Billy said.
She nodded, but didn’t believe it.
ROXANNE
PEOPLE WOULD GRIMACE when Roxanne wondered aloud about how Billy died. They would try to protect her, telling her not to think about it. Maybe that would have been easier, but she wanted to know.
Once when Roxanne was little, just 7, she carefully carried a cup of hot noodle soup out to the back porch of her aunt and uncle’s house in Mexico. She set it on the table and scooched her chair close just as a gust of wind kicked up and knocked the soup into her lap.
She screamed and tried to brush the hot soup off her bare legs with her hands. She remembers shuddering with pain and then going numb. She passed out.
She woke up in bed and wiped at her left thigh. The skin came off in the shape of her handprint.
The rest of the summer, the wound had to be cleaned and bandaged twice a day. Roxanne screamed through it all.
The burn barely left any physical scar. But when Billy was killed, Roxanne suddenly was 7 again, feeling that shot of pain and then the numbing relief. What must it have been like for him? During the first few days in Prescott after the fire, Roxanne met Vicki Minor, who runs the Wildland Firefighter Foundation in Boise, Idaho, a non-profit that helps families of fallen firefighters. Roxanne had asked what Billy would have experienced.
Minor said Billy would have quickly lost consciousness, probably before any flames reached him, because fire sucks all the oxygen out of the air.
Minor said that when a person is on fire, the pain is over in an instant when the nerves are destroyed. And, at a time like that, Minor told Roxanne, the brain releases euphoria-causing endorphins, and with those come a flood of happy memories.
“He wouldn’t have suffered,” Roxanne said. “Even if he was on fire, he wouldn’t have suffered, because he would have been reliving his happiest moments with his family.”
He would have been thinking of her and the baby.
Just before Billy’s funeral on July 10, Roxanne and Dan Klement waited at the Marana Regional Airport for the Black Hawk helicopters that would escort her husband home from Prescott. Roxanne had asked Klement to sit with her family at the service.
As they watched the skies, she asked Klement if he knew. “Do they feel it?” she asked. Klement said he hesitated on how to answer. He’d been burned. Most firefighters are at some point, and he knew it could be agonizing.
But he told Roxanne about a police officer he knew who went out on a call where a woman had doused herself in kerosene and, as officers approached, lit a match and set herself on fire. She didn’t scream, just talked calmly to the officers. She didn’t seem to be in pain. And then, she was gone. “Maybe it doesn’t hurt,” he said. She nodded. She would take solace in that for the moment.
She still had so many questions.
BILLY
IN ALL THOSE PHONE CALLS and e-mails before they were married, Roxanne and Billy had talked about where they wanted to live someday.
Neither wanted to live in a city. They wanted room for big dogs to run, where they could have a garden and horses. One day, their kids would need space to play.
The couple lived in a house in east Tucson but spent most of their free time with Roxanne’s parents in Avra Valley. Roxanne found what she thought was the perfect house nearby.
“It was turnkey-ready. You just move your stuff in,” she said.
But her mother found another house, just a mile from the first, and Billy fell in love with that one.
It was a Fleetwood double-wide mobile home, a sandy-beige color, three bedrooms and two baths on 4½ acres. It needed work. A lot of work.
“Oh, gosh, no,” Roxanne said when Billy showed it to her. “It has too much wrong with it.”
To start, it was a trailer. In the middle of a wash.
“The reason you don’t like it is you can’t picture it how I’m picturing it,” Billy said, smiling at her. “Let me show you.”
He drew it for her, sketching what he could see there in the desert where Roxanne saw a trailer in a wash. New windows. A deck out back. As he shaped it with his words and a pencil, Roxanne began to see it, too.
“He made it pretty on paper,” she said.
Billy pointed out how the property backed up to the Ironwood Forest National Monument. They could walk right out of their own backyard and go hiking or hunting. No one could ever build behind them, and the view was spectacular.
This would just be the start, he said. They would remodel the mobile home and then, someday, build something more solid, a real house, on their own land.
Billy would eventually create plans on the computer for that house, as well — a two-story, close to 4,000 square feet. Floor-to-ceiling windows would let in the light. A huge kitchen would open into the dining area and family room, with no walls to keep people apart.
It would be the house where family gathered for holidays, he promised Roxanne. They would have enough room for everyone.
They signed the papers on March 21 and moved in a week later. They had only two weeks before Billy would start work with the hotshots, but that was enough time for him to get started on the fence line and master bathroom. Roxanne’s job was to patch the holes in the walls and paint.
They would unpack together. There was no rush, Billy said.
They had all the time in the world.
ROXANNE
EVERY DAY AFTER BILLY DIED, Klement would call to check on Roxanne.
“How are you doing today?” he would ask, and they’d talk about whatever was on her mind.
One morning that first week, he drove back out to the house. Roxanne and her mother were there, the dogs out back.
“Let’s walk the house,” Klement said. “Show me what Billy was doing.”
The door to the master bedroom was boarded up and covered with plastic. Billy had uncovered mold in the bathroom and didn’t want Roxanne in there, especially since she was pregnant.
Klement peeled off the plastic and pulled off the boards. They went in together.
Billy’s work gloves and tools lay on top of a cabinet he had pulled out of the bathroom. It looked as though he might just have been taking a break, like he might be right back.
“I got the feeling like he was just there. I really felt his presence. I could picture him tearing that room apart,” Klement said. “But I knew he wasn’t there anymore. It just hit me.”
In the master bathroom, cardboard covered a huge hole in the floor, and and the walls were stripped to the insulation.
Klement saw the boxes still waiting to be unpacked, the walls needing paint. But just as Billy had shown Roxanne the potential of the place, Roxanne helped Klement begin to see it, too.
“There were a lot of things wrong, but my thought was that Billy was trying to make a comfortable place for them,” Klement said.
Klement wanted to finish what Billy started, even though he knew it was no real consolation.
He could see what would be needed: new plumbing, new wiring, new windows and more. It would be a major remodel, but it could be done.
They would need $20,000 to $30,000 in materials, Klement thought, but people were already asking what they could do to help. He could rally 40 or 50 firefighters and have them working on the place within a week.
Klement told Roxanne not to worry any longer about the house.
“We got this,” he said. KLEMENT SET OUT TO RAISE enough money to finish the renovations Roxanne and Billy had been doing.
But he was getting so many calls from people who wanted to help that his voice mail filled up every hour. He started to wonder if there was enough support to do something bigger.
He was torn, though. He knew remodeling the house was an idea Billy and Roxanne had loved. If Klement suggested something different, might Roxanne see it as an insult to Billy’s memory?
“I almost didn’t want to mention what we wanted to do,” he said.
But on the night before the memorial service for the 19 firefighters, when Klement went to dinner in Prescott with Roxanne and her mother, he broached the idea.
Maybe they shouldn’t remodel the trailer. Maybe they should build a real house from the ground up.
The women exchanged looks. Klement wasn’t sure what it meant.
“I saw this look on her face, and the way she looked at her mom, like
‘Wow,’ ” he said.
And Roxanne told him about her and Billy’s dream. That they had planned to someday build a real house on the land. That Billy had even drawn plans for it.
Roxanne had felt so grateful already for what Klement and everyone else was doing that she’d not mentioned it before. But now, Klement knew it had to happen, that it was meant to be.
BILLY
THE MORNING AFTER BILLY started his job with the hotshots in April, Roxanne called and asked, “Are you sitting down?”
He was, at the table at his great-aunt and -uncle’s house in Prescott. “What are you eating?” she asked. Cereal. “OK,” she said, “swallow what you have in your mouth and don’t take another bite.”
And then, she told him she was pregnant.
They had been married for more than four years but hadn’t planned on having kids yet. Billy thought it would be better to have two steady incomes, buy a house and then have a baby, the first of three to five, spaced evenly apart. Roxanne was the middle child of three; he was the middle child of five.
Billy was silent for just a moment. With the phone pressed to her ear, Roxanne could practically hear his brain working on a plan.
“I knew he would have 10 million things going through his head,” she said.
She listened as he thought out loud. They would need wills and a trust fund. Maybe they should talk to a financial adviser. Maybe invest in the stock market.
“He was really, really excited,” she said.
Two other hotshots on the crew were going to be fathers for the first time, one in late summer, another in the fall. Billy liked the idea of sharing the experience with his friends. Most of the crew was married, some already had children. They were family men. “It’s just like us,” he told Roxanne. The son of Firefighter Sean Misner and his wife, Amanda, was due first. He would be born Aug. 22 and named Sean Jaxon Herbert.
Anthony Rose and his fiancee, Tiffany Hettrick, were expecting their baby next. Willow Mae Rose would be born Oct. 10, her father’s birthday.
Billy and Roxanne’s baby was due Dec. 14.
Roxanne knew Billy would be a great father. He would take her niece, Emma, who’s 7 now, to Home Depot for kids workshops on how to build a toolbox or birdhouse. He took her fishing and camping. Those were the kinds of things he said he wanted to do with their kids, too.
If they had a boy, he would rope cattle; a girl would barrel-race. No bull riding for either, though. Too dangerous. He wanted them to fish and hunt; they would learn to clean whatever they caught.
“That’s totally Billy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a girl or a boy. They are going to be taught the same stuff,” Roxanne said.
On the night of June 28, when Billy called from Prescott to say goodnight, Roxanne asked, “Have you started thinking of names?”
No, not yet, Billy said. But he knew he didn’t like some of the ones she had suggested so far. Lachlan? No. Miles? No. Aria? “Where did you get Aria?” he asked. She had read it in a romance novel. Grace? “From ‘Amazing Grace’ and like the grace of God,” Roxanne told him. “OK, I like that one,” Billy said. He would be gone by the time Roxanne found out on July 22 that their baby was a girl.
In the ultrasound that day, the baby was curled in a tight ball, her knees to her chin. Then, she straightened out her legs, her toes appearing near her face. She grabbed her toes with her hands and then turned her back, Roxanne said, as if to say, “That’s it — show’s over.”
Her spine looked like a string of pearls on the screen.
Roxanne decided to name the baby “Billie,” after her father. Her middle name would be Grace.
ROXANNE
THERE HAD BEEN NO KEEPING Billy safe.
That had been Roxanne’s prayer the night of June 30. But as she stood in the place where the 19 hotshots died, she could see they had had no chance.
The walls of the box canyon that rose on either side of her were charred, the ground burned, draped in black ash. Huge granite boulders had cracked in the intense heat. Nothing could have survived. It had been two days since Roxanne had buried her husband.
She and her father had looked at a topographic map of the area, trying to understand what happened. But Roxanne wanted to go there, to see it for herself. Billy’s brothers, Fred and Da- vid; his sister, Melinda; his mother; and his great-aunt came, too.
Her eyes followed along the ridge of the canyon, tracing the path the men had taken.
Roxanne knew Billy would have looked for an escape route. He always did, even when they just went hiking in nearby Bear Canyon in the Coronado National Forest. During the monsoon, he would tell her, “You don’t ever want to go down in elevation because that’s where the water will be in the event of a flash flood.”
Then, he’d point: “See that ledge? That’s where we’d stay dry.”
“I used to always tell Billy, ‘Anytime there is any sign of danger, I want you to get out of there,’ ” Roxanne said. “‘I want you to outrun them all. Don’t be a hero.’ ”
But to Billy, who missed the camaraderie of the Marine Corps, the hotshots were like brothers, teasing each other, pushing one another to be better, always there for one another.
If anyone was ever in danger, Billy would help. It was the kind of person he was.
“I already knew, if something was going to happen, he wasn’t going to run,” Roxanne said.
Standing in the blackened stillness, Roxanne could see there would have been no escape route for the men, not with a steep ridge behind them and a wall of flames coming at them from the front. Not with the wind blowing so hard. Not without help. Roxanne had studied with Billy, read his textbooks, learned the dangers. She understood more than most. SHE WALKED SLOWLY, DRAGGING the toe of her shoe across the ground, turning over the layers of blackened earth. Tiny rivets. A screw. A bolt. A melted watch face. Delicate pieces of silver foil, shredded bits of the emergency shelters.
“It was sad. That was all there was to show that they were there,” Roxanne said.
She was looking for Billy’s wedding band —10 karat, plain gold, Size 9½. She didn’t really think it was out here; she hoped it wasn’t, anyway.
He usually took it off when he worked. Even when he was at home, whether cleaning or doing yard work, he always took off his ring and set it on the windowsill in the kitchen.
She was counting on him to have put his wallet in his backpack, like usual. Maybe it was among the personal items belonging to the hotshots that were still being held at the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office.
Fred picked up a pair of melted sunglasses and showed them to Roxanne. She shook her head. No, those weren’t Billy’s. He wore black Oakleys.
She was drawn to a spot where the rocks had been pushed to one side in a hurry and a tool used to dig a clearing about 3 inches deep.
Roxanne thought she recognized Billy's work. He used to do the same thing when they went camping. She could almost feel him there. She could almost hear his voice, explaining as he had before about using an emergency shelter: “You want to keep your face in the ground. As close to the ground as you can and breathe the cool air.”
“I always wonder what was going through his mind,” Roxanne said. “God, what was going through his mind? He must have known he was going to die.”
In the midst of all the blackness, Roxanne came across two tiny green shoots pushing up through the ground. She held out her cellphone and took a picture.
BILLY
AFTER BILLY STARTED WORKING with the hotshots, he and Roxanne made the three-hour drive to see each other whenever he had a couple of days off.
Roxanne was getting ready to make the drive to Prescott once when she started to feel nervous, her palms sweaty. It had been two weeks since she had seen him. It felt like years.
“Even after being married for years for 41⁄ years, anytime I would think about Billy, I would get all giddy and shy,” Roxanne said
In the car on the way up there, she scolded herself, “Calm down! It’s not like you’re meeting him for the first time!” He could still make her blush. During a visit in May, the couple had gone fishing, and Roxanne had fished a crawfish out of the water and held it up, smiling. Billy took a picture with his cellphone of her kneeling at the edge of the lake.
She had asked Billy, “Do the pincers hurt?” Yes, he told her. “How much?” she asked. Stick your finger in and find out. She did, and the crawfish grabbed hold, making her yelp. Billy roared with laughter.
In the days just after the fire, Roxanne got back the things Billy had left in the hotshots’ crew buggy, which was out of the path of the fire, including his cellphone.
When she turned it on, it buzzed again and again with text messages and voice mails from friends and family who had tried to reach him when they first heard news of the fire.
She also got back a few packs of Top Ramen. (Billy hated MREs.) A change of clothes. Dayquil. (He’d been fighting a cold.) His camera.
There were no pictures of him on his camera, only ones he had taken. She wishes she had taken more pictures of him, and of the two of them together.
But when they were out together, she would take a picture of him or he of her, not that many together. Or they might forget to take the camera altogether.
They thought they would have a lifetime together for picture taking.
Roxanne downloaded the pictures on Billy’s cellphone to hers. The last one he had taken of her was the one of her holding the crayfish.
ROXANNE
One of the early offers to help build a house for Roxanne came from Pastor Michael Johns at the Victory Worship Center in Tucson. He had a huge congregation of talented and skilled people and connections in the community, and they had helped in large efforts before.
Johns met with Klement and Roxanne and began pulling together a team of contractors, attorneys, accountants and an architect, all volunteers.
Johns seemed to share Klement’s devotion to Roxanne. He is a man of God, and the Bible says to care for widows and orphans. But it was more than that, he said. Billy gave his life for others. People recognized his sacrifice and wanted to do what they could to help in his absence.
“We get great rewards out of it personally, too,” Johns said. “Fundamentally, we all really like to do something good.” It was dubbed the Warneke Project. Church members began calling building contractors, businesses and community members, asking for donations of money, labor and materials. The congregation donated $8,000 to the project in a single collection alone.
Northwest fire crews sold T-shirts and collected donations in firefighter boots outside a Culver’s restaurant in July, raising $23,000. And the restaurant donated 20 percent of that day’s sales, as well. A Nevada fire department sent in $2,800; the Southern Arizona Homebuilders Association pledged $1,500. The 100 Club has promised $50,000. And, in August, the “Battle of the Bands for Billy” at the Old Father Inn brought in $7,300.
Altogether, big donations and small put $100,000 in the coffers. But the volunteers are still working to get labor and materials donated when they can so they don’t have to spend the cash. They hope to give any that remains to Roxanne to use for taxes, utility payments and living expenses as she adjusts to her new life.
Steve Schietroma, a recently retired engineer, has spent about 30 hours a week on the project, organizing donations and working with contractors. Rhonda Fure of BeachFleischman CPAs has handled the accounting work.
Local companies stepped up — construction, air-conditioning, electrical, plumbing, landscaping and more — and are working for free or reduced rates.
Manufacturers donated windows, the air-conditioning system, the concrete. Donors have promised to provide stucco, a garage door, countertops, a washer and dryer and light fixtures.
The owner of a company that installs drywall volunteered its services if someone would donate the materials.
That is how the project grew, volunteer after volunteer, company after company, donation after donation. A $30,000 concrete job cost $12,000. Dirt that typically costs $15 a ton was provided at $1.10 a ton, instead.
And “people thank us for giving them the opportunity to help,” Johns said. THE FINISHED HOME WILL resemble a farmhouse, an L-shaped design that suits the way Roxanne and Billy wanted to live, with open rooms and easy access to the outdoors.
A big open space will connect the kitchen, living and dining rooms, an Arizona room and two covered porches, one out back and one out front. A breezeway will join the garage to the laundry and utility rooms off the kitchen, and a pocket door will keep the dogs out when there’s company.
The ceilings are high, with windows all along the back of the house.
“I love big windows and lots of light,” Roxanne said. So did Billy. The view will be spectacular.
Paul Mickelberg, president of WSM Architects, designed many of the fire stations in the area. He volunteered to design Roxanne’s house.
“In a lot of ways, because of the clarity of what she and Billy had envisioned together, my job was actually pretty easy,” he said.
Roxanne showed him computer printouts of floor plans Billy had put together, with pictures of features they liked.
He situated the house so it would showcase the view while shielding the big windows from southern and western exposures, then moved the kitchen to create the turn in the L-shape of the 2,190-square-foot home.
The house will be energy-efficient, which was important to Billy and Roxanne. And Mickelberg kept the design simple, knowing that some of the people helping to build it would be volunteers.
In the end, hundreds of people will have had a hand in it.
“It’s amazing to see the community support,” Roxanne said. “The generosity of the people helping reminds me that there is so much good in the world.”
The roof will be metal, the walls covered in stucco. Trim will be fashioned from concrete. And a commercialgrade fire-sprinkler system will be installed in every room of the house.
Out front, firefighters will put in a memorial garden with a flagpole, gazebo and places to play. They will line the circular driveway with 18 trees, each marked with the name of a fellow hotshot.
The 19th tree will be Billy’s, the biggest, so that one day, his daughter will be able to climb its branches.
BILLY
IN JUNE, BILLY CAME HOME AFTER 14 days on a fire in New Mexico. He came in the front door smelling of smoke and covered in soot, his face black except for the outline of his sunglasses around his eyes.
Even the dogs weren’t sure it was him, though he was calling them by name: Hey, Scrap. Come here, boy. Hey, Roland, Remington. Here, Challen.
He dropped his gear in the corner of the front room, laughing. Roxanne laughed, too. She didn’t blame the dogs; he was smelly. Billy showered and put on his pajamas.
The next day, they went to Roxanne’s parents’ house, where Billy and her father read over new state hunting regulations. They grilled steaks for dinner.
The day after that, Roxanne and Billy ran errands together. She was purposefully keeping him out of the house so he wouldn’t find a fence that needed mending or some other chore to do.
“He was the kind of person who al-
ways had to be in motion,” she said. She wanted him to relax.
On the corkboard where they hung their car keys, Roxanne had pinned up a picture from her first ultrasound, taken eight weeks into the pregnancy. Billy kept stopping to look at it, then smiling at Roxanne. He even got a little misty.
When he’d first seen the picture, he had teased, “We might be having an alien. Is that a tail?” No, silly, she had told him. It was the umbilical cord. “Rox, I think we’re having an alien.” “I hope it’s not an alien,” she said. “I wanted to have
pony.”
ROXANNE
BILLY HAD BEEN DEAD FOR THREE MONTHS when Roxanne and her parents made the three-hour drive from Marana to Prescott again in late September.
Eighteen experts from across the country had converged to study the fire and the deaths, the most fatalities in a single U.S. wildfire in half a century. On Sept. 28, the Serious Accident Investigation Team would release its report, first to the firefighters’ families and then to the public.
The meeting for families would be at Prescott’s Mile High Middle School, where they would get a copy of the report, watch a 21-minute video and have access to a panel of experts.
No one knew what the report might say or whether it would conclude that someone or something was to blame. But the hotshots died in a frightening way, and family members had to decide how much information they wanted. Some wanted explanations; others said dwelling on the details would only cause more pain.
Roxanne, now seven months pregnant, wanted answers. What exactly had gone wrong? Could the deaths have been prevented?
Billy’s great-aunt and -uncle came to hear the report, as did his brother Fred, then stationed in Virginia. Billy’s mother, Kathie Purkey, traveled from California. She was torn about hearing the report but wanted to be there to support her daughter-in-law.
“No one is looking for who is at fault, but we want to know why,” Roxanne said. “Why did this happen?” ROXANNE CHECKED IN AT THE DOOR, picked up a copy of the report and sat down to wait for the meeting to start. She turned the report face down and began flipping through it back to front, the way she usually does with magazines.
She saw “William Warneke” on Page 94 and stopped.
“His name jumped out at me,” she said. “When I first saw it, it almost like knocked the wind out of me. I could just feel myself starting to panic. I had to take deep breaths to calm myself down.”
She began to read.
William Warneke, Granite Mountain #16
Those pages of the report told how each firefighter was found. The details were extensive and dire: 1. Shelter Condition: a. Outer Shell: 100% of foil burned away; silica cloth was brittle in some areas.
b. Inner Shell: 100% of foil was burned away; 98% of fiberglass burned away.
c. Floor: 98% of foil burned away; silica cloth brittle in some areas.
d. Seams: 10-inch tear in silica cloth at end cap.
“Burned away,” Roxanne thought. She remembered his words: “If I ever have to use this, I’m not making it.”
She read on. 2. PPE (personal protective equipment) Items: a. Clothing: Shirt collar and bottom area where shirt was tucked into pants was intact. Pants waistband was intact; all other parts of clothing were burned away.
Billy and his shirt, she thought. Tucked into his pants, always. It was him.
3. Body Position: The firefighter was found lying supine with feet towards the southeast.
4. Shelter Use: It is unclear if the firefighter was able to fully deploy the fire shelter. The firefighter had feet inside end cap of shelter; the rest of the shelter was underneath the firefighter. That was all. It took up maybe a third of a page. Roxanne flipped through a few more pages. Her eyes caught Billy’s name a second time, on Page 88.
It was a diagram that showed the clearing where the men had died, each depicted by a circle for the head and an elongated trapezoid for the body.
The position for “16. William Warneke” was at the head of the group of men, lying directly across the path of the approaching fire. He would have been among the first reached by the flames.
“It didn’t surprise me one bit,” Roxanne said. She held out the page to show her parents.
“He would have been in the thick of it. He would have faced the challenge and tackled it,” she said.
From reading the report, Roxanne believed Billy hadn’t made it into his shelter. “He used every single second that he could to help clear away that brush.”
At Billy’s head was “1. Eric Marsh.” At his feet was “3. Clayton Whitted.” Kevin Woyjek, Travis Turbyfill and Wade Parker lay on the other side of Whitted.
They were men Billy admired. Roxanne could imagine them working in those last desperate moments, side by side.
As the lights dimmed for the video, Roxanne closed the report.
She had not seen Billy’s body. Officials had used his dental records to identify him.
She had asked about the possibility of getting his fingerprint; she wanted to press it into gold to make a keepsake necklace. But no one ever got back to her about it. She thought people were avoiding the subject.
Now, she knew that there would have been no fingerprints. Now, she knew his death would have been quick. “I don’t have to worry that he had suffered or had been in agonizing pain,” Roxanne said.
The lights came back on after the video, and questions raced through Roxanne’s head. Other family members asked theirs aloud, some practically shouting.
“It’s in the report,” Roxanne remembers officials telling them. “It’s in the report.”
But there hadn’t been enough time for the families to skim the 116-page report, let alone read it thoroughly.
As in the video, the report said the incident had been handled properly that day, that no one was to blame. On Page 43, it said, “The Team found no indication of negligence, reckless actions or violations of policy or protocol.”
But it seemed to Roxanne that certainly something had gone wrong. Nineteen men were dead.
It had been painful to finally learn some details — how fast the fire traveled (“extreme speed of 10 to 12 miles per hour”), how hot it burned (“temperatures exceeded 2,000 degrees”), and how there was no way out (“the deployment site in the box canyon was not survivable”) — but the knowledge gave Roxanne a degree of peace.
“They did everything they could,” she said. “There is no ‘if’ about ‘Could they have made it?’ No one could have survived that.”
Not even her Billy, who had a plan for everything.
BILLY
ROXANNE REMEMBERS A CONVERSATION with Billy about whether there was anything that absolutely was a selfless act.
“‘There was always a hidden motivation.’ I said. ‘Dogs are loyal because you give them food and shelter. Babies are the most selfish of all. Mother Teresa and even the pope, they want a place in heaven. We’re selfish. It’s just humanity.’ ”
But Billy disagreed. In war, he saw men who jumped onto grenades without thinking to protect their buddies, and soldiers who ran through a hailstorm of bullets to pull a fallen comrade to safety. He mentioned firefighters, police officers, people serving on missions, even someone who just picks up an item another person has dropped and hands it back.
“It takes a person who is like that to believe that,” Roxanne said.
Billy saw the good in everyone. It didn’t come as easily to Roxanne. He told her she just had to look harder — and believe.
“I always told Billy, ‘You’re a much better person than me,’ ” she said.
And he had always been confident and sure. Together, before they made any decisions, they did their homework, looked at all the options. Billy liked to plan ahead.
Now, she was on her own.
ROXANNE
THERE WOULD BE NO EASING INTO IT, either. Her first big decision would be where to bury her husband.
Because Billy had been a Marine, he could be buried at the Prescott National Cemetery or even the National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona in north Phoenix. Ten of the other hotshots were buried at the Arizona Pioneers Cemetery in Prescott. If Billy were there, Roxanne thought, he would be with members of his crew.
She tried asking Billy, “Help me make a final decision where to put you to rest.” But she knew he wouldn’t care whether he was cremated or where he was buried. They had talked about it. He’d be dead; it wouldn’t matter to him.
It was up to Roxanne. Billy’s family, too, said the decision was hers.
Prescott seemed so far away. The National Memorial Cemetery in Phoenix did, too. It also was surrounded by desert, not what she imagined for a gravesite.
She talked to widows who told her they regretted burying their husbands far from home. Roxanne wanted Billy close.
So, she chose to bury him at the new Marana Cemetery, in the veterans section up front where the grass is bright green and newly mowed.
It would be just a 15-minute drive from her home. She’d be able to take Billie Grace there. ROXANNE AND BILLY HAD planned that he would support the family and that she would stay home until their child was school-age.
But now, he was gone, and everything was different. Roxanne had a new, urgent concern: How would she and the baby live?
All the firefighters’ families will receive one-time federal death benefits, about $328,000, from a program for public safety officers.
Six of the 19 hotshots who died were permanent employees of the Prescott Fire Department. Their families will receive a lump-sumlife-insurance payout, continuing health-care coverage and pension payouts from the statewide Public Safety Personnel Retirement System.
The other13 firefighters were classified as seasonal employees, which means they weren’t in the pension program. Their families are not eligible for city life insurance or health-care benefits. They are eligible only for workers’ compensation, the amount of which would be based on each firefighter’s pay level.
To Roxanne, the inequity didn’t seem right.
“No one says, ‘You stand 20 yards behind the guys with benefits because you don’t have benefits,’ ” she said. “They are all out there on the fire lines fighting the same fire.
“They all made the ultimate sacrifice. They all toed the line, shoulder to shoulder. None of them fled.” “I WOULD RATHER HAVE BILLY back than any amount of money,” Roxanne said. But that’s not possible. So now, she must stand up for herself and Billie Grace.
Billy would have told her that someone would do the right thing.
Roxanne believed that the state of Arizona should intervene on the issue of benefits because although the hotshots were employed by a city, they were working for and at the direction of state forestry officials.
In August, she wrote a letter to Gov. Jan Brewer urging her to call a special session to address the matter. Brewer’s spokesman responded, saying that Brewer shared Roxanne’s frustrations but that there were financial, legal and policy questions that had to be answered first.
In August, House Speaker Andy Tobin said he was crafting a bill he hoped would address the disparities in benefits. Just before Christmas, however, he and other legislators said that any action may have to wait until any lawsuits are resolved.
Roxanne has not yet received the promised federal benefit sum of $328,000. It will help when she does, but it won’t cover what her husband could have made in five years once he became a full-time firefighter.
She went on leave from her job after Billy died and has lived on his workers’ compensation, which is about half of what she had been making at Aveda. She was covered by her mother’s health insurance — and Billie Grace would be, too, when she was born — but only until Roxanne turns 26 in May. HALFWAY THROUGH DECEMBER, almost six months after the fire, Roxanne got the answers to her most pressing question:
Who was responsible for what happened at the Yarnell Hill Fire?
On Dec. 13, the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health presented its findings to the Industrial Commission of Arizona in Phoenix. At home in Avra Valley, Roxanne watched streaming video of the hearing on her computer.
The report said fire-management officials knowingly disregarded wildfireplanning rules, including not having a safety officer. The chain of command was unclear both to firefighters and air command, the report said, and at the peak of the crisis, no one knew the exact location of the Granite Mountain crew.
The men were sent into a hazardous situation without adequate safety provisions, communications or even maps, and they should have been pulled out hours before they were overrun by the flames, the report said.
The state forestry department was hit with $559,000 in fines and penalties, a figure that includes $25,000 for each firefighter’s family. State officials later contested the findings. A hearing on their appeal is expected in the next few months. Roxanne hopes fire officials will learn from what went wrong.
“It’s important to hold people accountable for it so it doesn’t happen again,” she said.
“If you won’t say, ‘This is what went wrong and howit went wrong, and this is how we are going to fix it,’ you can’t learn from that.” ALONG THE WAY, KIND PEOPLE have sent checks to Roxanne for her or the baby. And, as did each of the 19 families, Roxanne received $15,000 from the 100 Club of Arizona, which supports families of first responders injured or killed in the line of duty.
The100 Club has raised $4 million for the families and has so far distributed about half of it, paying many of the families’ expenses and debts, including what the Warnekes owed on their property.
So far, none of the $7 million raised by the United Phoenix Fire Fighters Association and Prescott Fire Fighters Charities has been distributed.
Roxanne had another decision to consider: whether to file a wrongful-death claim. Roxanne didn’t especially want to take legal action, but she knew she needed to look to the future.
On Dec. 19, she filed a notice accusing state and local government agencies of negligence. So far, 14 families have done so, with some parents asking for $5 million each, and each spouse asking for $10 million and $7.5 million for minor children. Prescott has said it it was not negligent; the state has yet to respond to the claims.
“I have to look out for us,” Roxanne said.
BILLY
ON A MONDAY NIGHT, AFTER a two-day visit home, Billy packed up again. He rubbed the dogs behind their ears — Scrap, Roland, Remington, Challen. He kissed Roxanne goodbye.
From the window, she watched him load his red truck and wave as he pulled away.
“All of a sudden, I had this urge to run after the truck and make him leave his wedding ring at home,” she said.
It was odd. Roxanne wasn’t normally the type to be anxious.
Billy didn’t usually wear his ring when he fought fires anyway. Even at home, if he was cleaning or working in the yard, he would take off the plaingold band and put it safely on the kitchen windowsill.
“Stop it,” Roxanne scolded herself. She held tightly to the windowsill and watched Billy stop his truck at the gate at the end of the driveway. He got out to open the gate, then got back in to drive through. There was still time. He stopped again on the other side, got out and walked back to close and latch the gate behind him. She could catch him. She gripped the windowsill tighter. “Stop it,” Roxanne said again. “Stop acting like this is the last time you’re going to see him.” Billy drove away. Roxanne stood at the window, sobbing.
It was June 17. It was the last time Roxanne would see him.
BILLIE GRACE
ON TOP OF THE THREE-TIERED cake, the baby figurine wore a pink cowboy hat, pink boots and a diaper. It made Roxanne laugh when she saw it.
The gathering at Victory Worship Church in Tucson on Nov.17 had typically happy purposes: to celebrate the anticipated arrival of a baby and to shower the mother-to-be with gifts and advice.
But Jan Anderson, a senior pastor at the church, and the pastors’ wives there — seven women in all — had hopes that this shower might also give Roxanne a few hours of normalcy in what had been a very difficult time.
Friends exclaimed about the size of her belly, and Roxanne laughed, both hands on her stomach. “I know. I can’t even suck it in anymore.” THE CLOSER ROXANNE’S DUE date got, the harder it was for her to wait patiently.
Her suitcase had been packed and in the car for weeks, the car seat buckled in, the baby’s first outfit chosen.
Her daughter seemed equally eager, Roxanne said, laughing. “It feels like she is trying to escape through my belly button.”
She washed all of Billie Grace’s new clothes, turning the lint in the dryer trap pink. She took Billy’s clothes from their dresser and put them into plastic storage bins and filled the empty drawers with baby clothes.
Roxanne had been reading about childbirth but couldn’t bring herself to go to the classes.
“I know Billy would be here, saying, ‘You need to go to these,’ ” she said.
But then, more quietly, “It’s hard enough going to the doctor’s office without him.”
Through her windows, she could see the progress on the new house: The dirt had been smoothed and leveled, the perimeter marked with wooden stakes tied with pink and orange fluorescent flagging tape, the forms for the foundation built, the concrete poured.
When framing began, Roxanne could begin to see Billy’s ideas coming to life. She could hardly believe he was missing it and that his dream was so strong it could persist without him. Her due date of Dec. 14 came. And went. Finally, on Dec. 19 at 5:58 a.m., after 22½ hours of labor, Roxanne took her daughter into her arms for the first time. Billie Grace weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces, was 20 inches long and was perfect.
“She looks like Billy,” Roxanne’s mother said. Her father, Brook, had cut the umbilical cord, the job that would have been Billy’s.
“He’s the proudest grandpa ever,” Roxanne said.
She could feel Billy there at the hospital and even smelled a faint scent of smoke. Her mother could smell it, too.
And when Roxanne saw Billy’s dimples on Billie Grace’s little face, she started crying.
Klement came to the hospital after Billie Grace was born and sat for an hour holding her as she slept. “She was beautiful, so peaceful,” he said. AT HOME, MOTHER AND BABY have fallen into a routine. Billie Grace rarely cries, except when she’s hungry.
“That’s the way Roxy was, too,” Maria, Roxanne’s mother, said. She’s taken time off work to help her daughter.
Billie Grace has her mom’s almondshaped eyes, though not brown like hers — the color is beginning to look more like her dad’s, which were hazel but looked green when he was happiest.
The baby sleeps through the hum of the vacuum cleaner, barking dogs and the buzz of the clothes dryer. She lifts her head when she hears her mother’s voice, then makes soft cooing noises.
“You’re so funny,” Roxanne tells her, kissing her cheeks and burying her face in her neck. Billie Grace tangles her fingers in her mom’s long hair. ROXANNE CROSSED THE YARD from the house with Billie Grace in her arms, snug in a pink and green blanket to protect her from the bright sun. Klement was there, talking to Travis Even, the owner of Bezalel Builders. He volunteered to oversee the Warneke Project and spent the two days after Christmas working on the framing.
For Klement, it is a relief to see the house taking shape. “I can’t wait until she can move in,” he said.
Roxanne and Klement walked through the spaces of the house, and she pointed out what will go where. The sliding glass door off the master bedroom. The freezer in the utility room. The window in the hallway.
When they finished the tour, Klement took Billie in his arms and automatically began to rock, side to side.
“She’s just perfect,” he said. DEC. 30 WOULD HAVE BEEN Roxanne and Billy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Instead, it marked six months since his death.
His wedding band is missing still, but if Roxanne gets it back, she may make it into something else, maybe earrings for herself and Billie Grace.
When nothing in Roxanne’s world seemed like it could ever be all right again, there was this baby, constant, developing at the proper pace, growing bigger and stronger, undaunted by the hard times going on around her. Always there, a promise of life, of hope.
“I see so much of Billy in her,” Roxanne says. His daughter will grow up only seeing pictures and hearing stories of him but surrounded by people family and friends, a tightly knit community and a brotherhood of firefighters.
Klement, or “Capt. Dan,” as Roxanne calls him now, has a daughter of his own at home. She is 7½, and she is teaching him about the times when only a dad will do. When Billie Grace needs him, he says, “I’ll always be there.”
It is a promise.