A five-year-old girl is in critical condition after a house fire Wednesday morning in North Baltimore.
The girl’s four-year-old sister and their mother died in the early morning fire.
It wasn't supposed to happen to them, not like this – not now.
“The world just lost a great person. That’s the best I can say because she was – she was great mom,” Carmalita Sykes, a neighbor who lives a few doors down, said.
She says she smelled the smoke trickle into her window at a little after 1 a.m.
“Of course I checked my house and then I noticed a large plume of smoke coming out of the house. I came out here and the fire department was here and they were busting windows and going on,” Sykes said.
The firefighters went in to carry out the woman and her two children. About 60 or so gutted the home on East Cold Spring Lane.
Fire Chief Niles Ford calls it devastating.
“…just terrible. I mean this is Christmas. This is the time of year that children are supposed to be joyous. We’re not supposed to be talking about funerals for children,” Ford said.
Or for a family, Sykes says, that was filled with so much joy and love.
“You could see the love that she had for her girls. She would get up. She’d take them where they had to go. She’s go to work. She’d come home. They stayed in the house and they pretty much stayed to themselves. Never heard a bad word out of her mouth,” Sykes said.
The fire department is still determining the cause of the fire, but says the home did have at least one working smoke detector.
