Fire devastates Odessa home

It seemed like a nightmare, a recurring one. She heard crackling and glass shatter again and again, but didn't know whether to trust the dreamlike revelations and wake up. "We have to get out!" warned Debbie Cummins, and the nightmare Laveta Shelton couldn't shake was indeed real -and happening for the third time in her life.

Around 7:45 a.m. Sunday morning, Cummins awoke to eye-level smoke in their house at 410 W. Hillmont Road. "I woke up, smelled fire, jumped up, we grabbed our house coats and dashed out -that's all we had time for," Cummins said. "The house was black, there were no flames yet."

The two exited the house with their pets Gizmo and Ms. B, but two more dogs were caught in the bathroom and one cat remained in the house.

Most of the house burned completely down, while the remaining standing portion's attic caved in, leaving only the roof and the exterior.

"It was caving in as soon as we got out," Shelton said. "If we would've slept 10 minutes longer, we wouldn't have made it."

Shelton required breathing treatments for smoke inhalation and asthma, and Gizmo needed treatment for smoke inhalation and burns. Gizmo ran back into the house once Cummins and Shelton had exited, but a piece of Sheetrock fell on top of him, sheltering him from the flames long enough to allow firefighters to save him.

No investigation was conducted as to the origins of the fire because it happened outside the city limits, and the county and sheriff did not request an investigation, assistant fire marshal Al Mata said.

After leaving the burning house, Shelton and Cummins ran to neighbors' houses to alert them. Shelton attempted to go back in the house and find a phone, but the smoke made it impossible to see anything.

"We couldn't call for help and the first neighbor I tried didn't answer their door," Shelton said. "So I ran into the street and tried to flag someone down. I saw my neighbor pulling out of the drive way, and I stopped him. He said he'd already called the fire department."

The two stayed in that neighbor's home until the fire department arrived.

"The sheriff met us at that house and our neighbors gave us socks and blankets," Shelton said. "I can't believe the generosity we've encountered."

This home was the one Shelton came home to as a newborn. She had experienced this trauma twice before, once with the home that belonged to her daughter, located next to this one, and another time at her home in Blossom.

Yet she and Cummins refuse to look back, and instead wish to "pick up the pieces."

"I just thank God we made it," Shelton said. "We're grateful that God had His hand over us. We're thankful for our friends, and now, we start over."

"We'll improve this church so that we can live in it until we're ready for the next step," Cummins said. As for now, the two live in New Song Church, furnished with a bed and sofas by their friends and family.

Revisiting the site of their home proved overwhelming for both.

"It's devastating," Shelton said. "I put my hand where the door should've been and said, ‘I want to go home. I just want to go home.' "

To console her, Cummins recalled a passage from Scripture to ground them even deeper in their faith: " ‘We grieve, but not as the world grieves,' and that gives us hope," she said.