Last Monday, Jackie Pham Nguyen was grateful that she still had power in her Texas home.
Her kids – Colette, 5, Edison, 8, and Olivia, 11 – played in the snow that morning before popping in for hot chocolate and scraps of food from the Lunar New Year celebration. For hours they played banana charts and other board games.
Their grandmother, Loan Le, joined them. The 75-year-old, who had lost warmth in her own home amid the state’s power cuts, braved icy roads to shelter in their Sugar Land home.
“To be honest, it was a great day. We had lunch at home, hung out. The kids were thrilled they didn’t have school because it was President’s Day, and we just had the news in the background all the time, ”Jackie said. “All day long, I was grateful that we were among the 10 to 15 percent of Houston that had power.”
When the lights went out at 5:00 PM, the family was not deterred. They huddled together for warmth, Jackie lit the fireplace and they kept playing games. Around 9:30 PM or 10:00 PM, Jackie tucked the kids upstairs to bed and went to sleep in her room downstairs.
Four hours later, the house was in flames. Jackie said she doesn’t remember much about that night, except that when she woke up in a hospital bed, a firefighter told her the kids – and her mom – were gone.
“After that I could no longer breathe. Even now I can’t believe it. This is a crazy nightmare and I could wake up any minute now, ”Jackie told The Daily Beast.
“How did we all have this perfectly normal day and how did it end like this?” she said.
We don’t know why the lights went out like that. The city should have been prepared for it.
Authorities are investigating the cause of the fire amid extreme weather and a deadly statewide power crisis. Initial social media reports suggested the inferno may have been caused by the fires that the family lit to keep warm.
Dozens of people in Texas – and across America – died in last week’s winter storms. The cold snap especially caused extensive damage to the Lone Star State, where millions of people lost electricity, heat and water due to the state’s faulty infrastructure.
Among the dead is 11-year-old Cristian Pineda, who died of suspected hypothermia in his icy mobile home in Conroe. The sixth grader and his family came to the US from Honduras two years ago. Cristian’s mother, Maria, has filed a $ 100 million wrongful death lawsuit against the state’s grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the utility company, Entergy Corporation.
Houston mother Eetesh Mersha and 7-year-old daughter Rakeb Shalemu died of carbon monoxide poisoning after desperately seeking heat in their car.
Andy Anderson, a Vietnam veteran in Crosby, died of hypothermia while trying to run a generator; he relied on an oxygen machine, which would not work without electricity.
There are many tragic stories of loss, and more are likely to come.
Vanessa Kon, an aunt of the Nguyen children, told The Daily Beast that she felt officials should have been prepared for the power grid disaster.
“We don’t know what happened,” said Kon. ‘We don’t know why the lights went out like that. The city should have been prepared for it. Why was the power turned off? If the power had not been turned off, this would not have happened. “
Jackie, for her part, hasn’t even begun to think about allegations of negligence against Texas power companies. “I’m in kind of a triage crisis right now,” Jackie told us from a long-term hotel. “I’m just waiting for what people have to say.”
Jackie said she spent two days in a hospital burn ward before leaving against doctors’ advice. For days she still smelled the smoke from her burning house, until she finally found a hotel with running water.
“I don’t remember much about that night,” she said. “I had a lot of trouble breathing smoke. It kind of affected my brain cognition. I really hope a lot of it comes back. Because I want to be able to put all of that together. “
Jackie remembers having Olivia talk about Zoom that night with her friends from a summer camp in New York, despite trying to conserve energy on their electronic devices while waiting for outages. “I’m grateful I let that go a little bit so she could have it. So her friends can have that memory, ”Jackie said.
She remembers that the kids tried to teach Loan to play the card game Speed, but Loan didn’t catch on. She thinks of little Colette, nicknamed Coco, who suggests that they mix chocolate syrup with milk because they run out of cocoa mix.
He always felt if I was sad, if I was stressed, or if I was worried. He would just come and check on me – my 8 year old!
Jackie said Granny Loan lived only five miles away and usually never slept anywhere other than her own house. Even during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Loan stubbornly chose to stay alone. “I thought it was so weird she didn’t even make it difficult for me to come over,” Jackie said of Monday’s sleepover. ‘I kind of wonder … if things happened that way so she would be there. She wouldn’t have survived if she knew what had happened to her grandchildren. “
The grieving mother – who suffered burns and inhaled smoke from the fire – said a bleep was going through her head. She remembers standing in the foyer of her two-story home and encountering walls of flame. She screamed for the children but did not hear them. All she could hear was the crackling of fire, the sound of the walls falling apart.
She believes her friend, a light sleeper who slept that night, dragged her out of the house. The friend tried to call emergency number, but her phone didn’t work, so she ran outside and banged on the neighbor’s door.
“Obviously, as a parent, you wonder if you could have done anything,” said Jackie. ‘The way it has been explained to me is simply, I’m lucky to be alive. I didn’t have to do anything else. “
While trying to find out what happened that night, Jackie said she wants people to know who her children were – and how important their grandmother was in their lives, an unsung hero and the glue that held the family together.
Jackie’s parents moved to the US from Vietnam in 1981, where Jackie was born. Loan and her husband, Cau Pham, were refugees in Malaysia before coming to California and later Texas. Jackie’s three children were first-generation Americans.
“If it wasn’t for my kids, I don’t think she would have made it that long,” Jackie said of Loan, adding that Cau died several years ago. They gave her a sense of purpose. She scheduled everything around their 3am pick up time at school. Or she ran errands for us. “
“I can’t say enough about how much my mom was a rock to me and a saving grace to my kids,” added Jackie.
Jackie’s colleagues at the technology company Topl and her cohort at Rice University, where she will earn an MBA this spring, have launched a GoFundMe that has raised more than $ 278,000. At this point, the fundraiser is a placeholder for a future foundation honoring Colette, Edison, and Olivia. (Kon also created a GoFundMe on behalf of her brother, Nathan Nguyen, the children’s father.)
All of her children, she said, were completely different “little people.”
The first-born Olivia was witty and sarcastic, and loved to ski and listened to Queen, Journey and other classic rock music. “She really is an old soul – trapped in this high school student’s body,” said Jackie. She’ll tell me what songs are about. Anything she was curious about would dive in. Every song, she reads the lyrics, looks up the history, the band members. She could have been Danger or some sort of trivia. “
The mother and daughter had a special bond; both were the oldest in their family. “She was such a good big sister,” said Jackie. It was a love-hate relationship [being the oldest child]It’s a burden. It’s a different way she and I interacted. “
Edison had just turned 8 in November and was a sweet, gentle boy who loved art and painting and was eerily attuned to other people’s moods. Jackie said Edison was mildly autistic and struggled with social tactics, but he was also incredibly considerate. He could always sense if I was sad, if I was stressed, or if I was worried. He would just have a look at me – my 8 year old! “
‘I would ask him,’ Are you happy, son? Are you having a good day? ‘ The things we often said to each other were, “When you’re happy, I’m happy too,” said Jackie. “If you spent a minute with him, you just knew he had such a warm heart.”
Colette, 5 years old, was a girly girl and unashamedly herself – especially when creating videos for TikTok. She even created and presented a PowerPoint show for Jackie’s birthday, with a slide that read, “Top 5 Reasons I Love Mommy.”
“She was constantly dancing and talking to herself, like she was on a live show,” said Jackie. She wouldn’t accept her birth order. There was no way anyone would hit her and bully her. “
But she was also very loving and affectionate, always hugging her mother or holding her hand. “Even when she looks at you, she looks at you longingly and deep in your eyes, it’s cute,” said Jackie.
Jackie said she wants the GoFundMe money to go to charities related to the performing and visual arts, autism awareness, and reading and reading and writing – themes that speak directly to who her children were as people.
“They are great little people and they would have become great to really contribute and make a difference,” she said.
“This is the legacy I could make for them. This is the good they might have done if they could have lived their lives. “