Last Monday, Jackie Pham Nguyen was grateful to still have power in her Texas home.
Her children, 5-year-old Colette, 8-year-old Edison and 11-year-old Olivia, played in the snow that morning before heading in for hot chocolate and leftover food from the Lunar New Year celebrations. For hours, they played Bananagrams and other board games.
Their grandmother, Loan Le, joined them. The 75-year-old, who had lost heat to her own residence amid state power outages, faced icy roads to take refuge in her Sugar Land home.
“It simply came to our notice then. We had lunch at home, had a good time. The kids were excited not to have school because it was Presidents Day, and we only had the news posted in the background all the time, “Jackie said.” Throughout the day, I felt grateful to be a part of the 10-15. percent of Houston who had power. “
When the lights went out at 5 p.m., the family was not discouraged. They came together to get warm, Jackie lit the fireplace and continued playing. Around 9:30 or 10 p.m., Jackie put the kids to bed upstairs and went to sleep in her downstairs room.
Four hours later, the house was on fire. Jackie said she doesn’t remember much about that night, except when she woke up in a hospital bed, a fire officer informed her that the children – and their mother – had left.
“After that, I couldn’t breathe. Even now I can’t believe it. This is a crazy nightmare and I will wake up at any moment, ”Jackie told The Daily Beast.
“How did we all have that perfectly normal day and how did it end like that?” she said.
“We don’t know why the lights went out like that. The city should have prepared for this.”
Authorities are investigating what caused the fire, which occurs amid an extreme climate and a deadly power crisis across the state. Initial reports on social media suggested that hell could have started from the fire the family lit to warm up.
Dozens of people in Texas – and across America – have died during last week’s winter storms. The cold caused havoc especially in Lone Star State, where millions of people lost electricity, heat and water due to failures in the state’s infrastructure.
Among the dead is eleven-year-old Cristian Pineda, who died of alleged hypothermia in his icy cold mobile home in Conroe. The sixth grader and his family came to the United States from Honduras two years ago. Cristian’s mother, Maria, has filed a $ 100 million death row for wrongdoing against the state’s network operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the utility company Entergy Corporation.
Houston’s mother, Etenesh Mersha, and 7-year-old daughter Rakeb Shalemu died of carbon monoxide poisoning after desperately searching for heat in their car.
Andy Anderson, a Vietnam veteran at Crosby, died of hypothermia while trying to run a generator; relied on an oxygen machine, which does not work without electricity.
There are many tragic stories of losses and others will probably come.
Vanessa Kon, an aunt of the Nguyen children, told The Daily Beast that she believed officials should have been prepared for the power grid disaster.
“We don’t know what happened,” Kon said. “We don’t know why the lights went out like that. The city should have prepared for this. Why did the power go out? If it weren’t off, that wouldn’t have happened. “
For his part, Jackie has not even begun to consider allegations of negligence against Texas power operators. “Right now I’m in this sort of triage,” Jackie told us from an extended hotel stay. “I’m waiting for what people have to say.”
Jackie said he spent two days in a hospital burn unit before marching against doctors’ advice. For several days, he still smelled smoke from his burning house, until he finally found a hotel with running water.
“I don’t remember many things from that night,” he said. “I suffered a lot of smoke inhalation. It’s kind of a deterioration of my brain cognition. I really just hope it comes out again. Because I want to be able to combine all this. “
Jackie remembers letting Olivia talk about Zoom with her friends at a New York summer camp that night, despite wanting to conserve the power of her electronic devices in anticipation of blackouts. “I’m grateful she left a little bit for that, so she could have that. So your friends might have that memory, ”Jackie said.
He remembers the kids trying to teach Loan how to play the Speed card game, but Loan wasn’t catching up. Think of little Colette, nicknamed Coco, who suggests she mix milk chocolate syrup because they ran out of cocoa mixture.
“I could always feel if I was sad or stressed or worried. I would only check in: my 8 year old son.”
Jackie said Grandma Loan lived only five miles away and usually didn’t spend the night anywhere but at home. Even during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Loan stubbornly chose to be left alone. “I thought it was so weird it didn’t even cost me to come,” Jackie said about Monday night. “I wonder a little … if things would go this way for me to be there. He could not have survived knowing what happened to his grandchildren.
The grieving mother, who suffered burns and smoke inhalation from the blaze, said a blip repeats through her mind. He remembers being in the lobby of his two-story house and encountering walls of flames. He called for the children, but did not listen to them. He only heard the crackling of fire and the noise of the walls disintegrating.
She believes her friend, a light woman who slept that night, dragged her from home. The friend tried to call 911 but his phone did not work, so he ran out and knocked on the neighbors doors.
“Viously, obviously, as a parent, you wonder if you could have done something,” Jackie said. “The way they have told me is that I am lucky to live. There was nothing else to do. “
As Jackie tries to reconcile what happened that night, she said she wants people to know who her children were, and how important her grandmother was in their lives, an unknown hero, and the glue that kept the family together.
Jackie’s parents moved to the United States in 1981 from Vietnam, where Jackie was born. Loan and her husband, Cau Pham, were refugees in Malaysia before arriving in California and after moving to Texas. Jackie’s three children were first-generation Americans.
“If it weren’t for my kids, I don’t think I would have gotten it while I did,” Jackie said of Loan, who added that Cau died a few years ago. “They gave him a sense of purpose. She scheduled everything around the collection of the three at school. Or he bought groceries for us. ”
“I can’t say enough about how much my mother was a stone to me and save my children grace,” Jackie added.
Jackie’s co-workers at tech company Topl and her cohort at Rice University, where she will win an MBA this spring, launched a GoFundMe that has raised more than $ 278,000. Right now, the fundraiser is a place set aside for a future foundation in honor of Colette, Edison and Olivia. (Kon also created a GoFundMe on behalf of his brother, Nathan Nguyen, the father of the children).
He said all of his children were tremendously different “little humans”.
Firstborn Olivia was witty and sarcastic, and loved to ski and listen to Queen, Journey, and other classical rock music. “She’s a very old soul, trapped in the body of this high school student,” Jackie said. “He will tell me what the songs are about. Anything he liked curiosity would submerge. Each song, read the lyrics, review the story, the band members. It could have been Danger or some kind of curiosity “.
The mother and daughter shared a special connection; both were the eldest of their families. “She was such a good big sister,” Jackie said. “It was a love-hate relationship [being the oldest child]. It is a burden. It’s another way of relating to her and me. “
Edison had just turned eight in November and was a sweet, kind boy who enjoyed art and painting and was attuned to other people’s moods. Jackie said Edison was slightly autistic and struggled with social touch, but he was also incredibly considerate. “I could always feel if I was sad or stressed or worried. I would just check in: my 8 year old! “
“I would ask,‘ Are you happy, son? Do you have a good day? The things we told each other a lot were, “If you’re happy, I’m happy,” Jackie said. “If you spent a minute with him, you would only know he had such a warm heart.”
Colette, 5, was a female girl and herself no excuses, especially when she was making videos for TikTok. He even made and presented a PowerPoint program for Jackie’s birthday, with a slide that said, “The top five reasons I love mom.”
“She was dancing and talking to herself all the time, like she was on a live show,” Jackie said. “I did not accept his birth order. There was no way anyone would make her fall and intimidate her anyway. ”
But she was also very affectionate and affectionate, always hugging her mother or holding hands. “Even when he looks at you, he looks at you with longing and deep in your eyes, he’s adorable,” Jackie said.
Jackie said she wants GoFundMe’s money to go to causes related to the performing and visual arts, autism awareness and reading and literacy, topics that speak directly to who her children were as people.
“They’re amazing little humans and they would have grown up to be amazing, to really contribute and make a difference,” he said.
“This is the legacy I could make for them. That is the good they could have done if they had been able to live their lives. ”