Another One for the Darwin Awards

play with fire and you're gonna get burned

Published on March 10, 2005 By Gene Nash In Current Events

Welcome to Marrero, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi from New Orleans.

What do you do when you move into an apartment owned by a cop? First, you lie to the sheriff deputy that only you, your daughter, and your three grandkids will live there, but crowd in 15 people. Then you have the electricity turned off while you transfer it into your name. Then you spread candles throughout the house to compensate for the lack of electricity.

What would you do if all those candles caught a mattress on fire? Pour water on it? Call 911? Wake everyone up and run screaming from the apartment?

These brainiacs decided the best course of action was to drag the flaming mattress outside. In the process, it got jammed in the doorway, trapping everyone else inside. 11 members of one family, ranging in age from 6 months to 42 years, died in the inferno.

Brilliant.

Comments

Gene Nash

on Mar 11, 2005

We now have more details.

Sabrina Wilson and her family had moved in late Wednesday after being threatened with eviction in a dispute with a landlord over repairs at another home.
...
Investigators believe Sabrina's brother George Wilson grabbed the mattress and pushed it down the apartment's stairwell toward the front door, Williams said Friday.

"The mattress flames were growing rapidly by the time he got it down the stairs," Williams said.

Williams said the front door was also locked and boxes were piled at the base of the stairwell, further obstructing the escape route.

Still, George Wilson and Ireone Wilson, Sabrina's 17-year-old daughter, managed to make it downstairs and out a back door.

Authorities were told that Ireone Wilson's boyfriend escaped through an upstairs window with their baby, who is about 8 months old, Williams said.
...
Sabrina Wilson and 10 other relatives died.

It was bad enough before, but now we know that the mattress was on the second floor.

What possesses somebody to think that the best way to handle the situation was pushing a flaming mattress throughout the entire house, through piles of cardboard boxes, down a flight of stairs, toward a locked door?

Oh, my God.

NJforever

on Mar 11, 2005

Wow....I always think people can't get any stupider than the last idiot, then someone does something like this...

kingbee

on Mar 12, 2005

someone should report this to the arson squad. an obvious case of someone trying to destroy evidence of tag removal.

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