ROSEDALE, Md. — It was 2:00 in the morning when Joan Morrison got a call while working the night shift that her home a few blocks away on Radecke Avenue was on fire.
By the time she arrived there, it was fully engulfed in flames.
“The house was all up in fire so I was running around like, ‘Where are my kids at?’ That’s all I wanted to know,” said Morrison, “‘Did they perish in the fire?’ So I was just running and asking everybody, ‘Do you see my kids? Do you see my husband? Do you see my mom?”
Morrison would later learn that all five had made it out in time, even though their smoke alarms never sounded, thanks to her mother suddenly awakening in the middle of the night and spotting flames outside her back window.
“She hadn’t woken up,” said Morrison, “It was just God. She just woke up to go to the bathroom and then she was able to run inside to wake my husband up and then wake up and get the kids. Wake them up and they all ran outside.”
While Morrison and her family were renting the townhouse, tragically, they did not have insurance to cover its contents.
“No insurance,” said Morrison, “I lost everything.”
Morrison says investigators believe the fire started outside the back of her home at an electrical box and then spread to her house and that of her next door neighbors leaving a total of nine people displaced.
