To Have, To Cherish, To Safeguard
It is the face of a very young child, a little girl of surpassing beauty. She sits on a tiny bicycle. She is only four years old. She has large, wide eyes. They look earnestly into the eyes of the beholder. She has shoulder-length hair, straight, with a slight flip, and her bangs hang low over her forehead. She is dressed nicely, obviously well cared for, obviously well loved.
There is a reason, of course, why this child's photograph appears in the newspaper. It is the way the newspaper brings to our attention, the reading public, the matter of a personal tragedy. For this four year old child will forever be four years old; she will remain as she is, in the memory of those who knew and valued her. The child is dead, she died in a domestic fire, an accidental fire that consumed her single mother's half of a double house.
The little girl's mother is 31 years old, and she was quite badly burned over the lower half of her body. The little girl had a brother, 11 years old, and most fortuitously he was staying overnight at the house of a friend. The father doesn't live with this family, he is on his own, living in their former apartment, a small affair which their mother was eager to exchange for this 3-bedroom rented house.
The couple who live in the other half of the rented house are fine. They were alerted to the fact that there was a fire on the opposite side and evacuated safely. There was no smoke alarm in the half that the child, her sibling and mother lived in. There was a smoke alarm in the attached segment of the building, paid for and installed by the renting inhabitants, the two who escaped to safety.
This single mother, who without doubt loves her children and feels she would do anything on earth to keep them from harm obviously gave no thought to the fact that her home, rented though it was, had no smoke alarm. There is a legal requirement in the Province of Ontario that households must have smoke alarms installed; moreover, new requirements insist that such alarms be installed on every floor of a home.
This mother of an eleven-year-old boy and, sadly, a four-year-old girl was a smoker. This woman quite obviously did not believe that her habitual smoking might pose a health hazard to her children; either to their respiratory system and thus imperil their future health, or through a danger of fire caused by carelessness, sometimes termed "accidental".
The fire audit revealed that the fire began in a sofa on the first floor, then travelled to the second floor. This would neatly account for the mother's burns on the lower half of her body. This unfortunately accounts for the death of her beloved child. It is unknown whether charges will be laid in this dreadful "accident" leading to the death of a beautiful little girl.
Should charges be laid they would most likely be laid against the landlord who, despite legal obligations, had not installed a smoke alarm in his rented-out accommodation.
posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 12, 2006
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