DINWIDDIE COUNTY, Va. — A senior McKenney couple lost their home and all of their belongings in a fire over the weekend.
Charlotte Hudson and Robert Jones, who had rented the house for over 10 years, are now grappling with the aftermath.
The fire broke out on Saturday while Jones was not at home. Hudson managed to escape through the window after waking to find the room engulfed in flames. The couple's dogs, who alerted Hudson to the fire, were also rescued.
“I feel blessed to be alive. Thank God I made it out alive,” Hudson said.
Reflecting on her escape, Jones, her partner, said, “She’s got a lot of spunk in her.”
The couple lamented the loss of everything in the fire, including cherished family pictures. “Just lost everything, you know, everything, a lot of memories,” Jones said.
Jones mentioned that he lost pictures of his father, whose birthday would have been the day after the fire. Hudson also lost precious photographs of her late son.
Investigators are still looking into the cause of the fire, but Hudson mentioned that she fell asleep while incense was burning. Dinwiddie County Fire and EMS Chief David Kissner commented on the importance of using precautions when burning incense or candles.
“It’s okay to use those, to burn incense and to burn candles,” Kissner said. “You have to make sure you have proper distance around combustibles. That will be paper. That will be curtains. That will be anything that could possibly ignite. You need to have probably a 1 to 2-foot radius on those areas.”
The house lacked a working smoke detector, which Kissner emphasized is critical for saving lives. He advised replacing smoke detector batteries every six months and testing newer models with 10-year lithium batteries twice a year.
If you would like to support the couple, a GoFundMe has been set up to assist them.
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