Three children and their grandmother died in a house fire near Houston last week during a power outage when Texas was hit by historically cold weather, local officials said.
According to Doug Adolph, a spokesman for the city of Sugar Land, firefighters arrived at Jackie Pham Nguyen’s home shortly after receiving an emergency call around 2am on Feb. 16.
The structure was already “engulfed” in flames, Adolph said, with Nguyen outside the house. Nguyen, the mother of the three children, “had to be physically stopped from running back to her burning house,” Adolph said.
After suppressing the blaze, firefighters found the bodies of three children and their grandmother.
Adolph said their neighborhood had been without electricity for hours and the family posted on social media that they were lighting their fireplaces to keep warm after dark.
However, Adolph warned that the investigation is ongoing. “We have not yet identified a cause of the fire, and it is possible that we never will,” he said.
In an interview with CNN, Nguyen recalled her children, 11-year-old Olivia, 8-year-old Edison, and 5-year-old Colette, as “ phenomenal, amazing little tough people, ” and her mother as a refugee. from Vietnam who arrived in Kansas with nothing, sacrificed a lot for her children and whose love was “ten times greater when it came to the grandchildren.”
Jackie Pham Nguyen did not immediately respond to a request from NBC News for comment, and neither did Nathan Nguyen, the children’s father.
Dual online crowdfunding pages, hosted by both parents and verified by GoFundMe, remember the kids as “eternal sources of light and wonder” and “angels” with “funky and cheeky attitudes”.
Together, the pages have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars as of Friday night.
In a statement on the fundraising page, Jackie Pham Nguyen thanked the donors for their support and said that “we would most like to honor Olivia, Edison and Colette with some kind of lasting foundation.”
“Our hearts are now broken,” Nguyen wrote. However, your kind deeds have given us some comfort to get us through. We are all eternally grateful to you. ‘
