Dallas man who lost wife, kids in fire seeks visual smoke alarms for
deaf tenants
April 16, 2009
By EMILY RAMSHAW / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN – When the raging late-night electrical fire broke out,
Tyrus Burks, who is deaf, couldn’t hear an alarm sound. The alarm’s
flashing light – tucked by apartment managers into a stairwell –
also didn’t wake him or his sleeping wife.
By the time the flames reached him, it was all he could do to rouse
his oldest sons from bed. When his mother arrived at the scene of the
West Dallas apartment blaze, she found Tyrus curled in the fetal
position on the asphalt, his deaf high school sweetheart and two more
of their children trapped inside.
Four years after Tyrus, now 31, lost half of his family in that fire,
he is determined to save other deaf people from a similar fate. He was
in Austin last week pushing legislation to require property managers
to install fire alarms with flashing lights in the bedrooms and common
areas of hearing-impaired people who request them – a bill named for
his wife, Sephra.
“I wasn’t able to find my babies and wife and save them,” Tyrus told
lawmakers through a sign language interpreter. “If I had just had a
little bit more time, I know they would be with me today.”
Today, the state property code requires landlords to install audible
smoke alarms, not visual ones.
The Sephra Burks bill, authored by Dallas Sen. Royce West, requires
property managers to buy and install visual smoke alarms if a tenant
with a hearing impairment requests it – and to put them in highly
visible locations, including bedrooms.
The bill awaits a vote in both the House and the Senate.
Apartment managers say they support the bill and can handle the
expense. The deaf routinely wake up to flashing lights – it’s how
many of their alarm clocks are outfitted. And studies show audible
smoke alarms often aren’t loud enough to wake children younger than
10.
“We feel like it is certainly the right thing to do,” said George
Allen, executive vice president of the Texas Apartment Association.
“We just want to make sure when the request is made that there is a
real need for the device.”
Tyrus and Sephra met in a Samuell High School program for
hearing-impaired students and quickly fell in love. They attended the
Texas School for the Deaf in Austin, got married back in Dallas, and
had four children, none of whom were deaf.
On a January night in 2005, the Burks family celebrated little
Antonio’s third birthday with dinner at a pizza restaurant. Afterward,
Tyrus and Sephra tucked Antonio, Tyrus Jr., then 7, and Michael, 6,
into their beds and fell asleep. Tyrus rose in the night to feed
infant Viviana a bottle, then went downstairs to the living room of
their two-story apartment, where he dozed off in front of the
television.
He woke to find the room thick with smoke and the couch in flames,
the result, fire investigators later determined, of a faulty power
strip. Tyrus tried, unsuccessfully, to put the fire out. Then he
stumbled upstairs to find the children.
Tyrus started in Antonio’s room, but the smoke was so thick he
couldn’t find him. He went to rouse Sephra, who was in bed with the
baby. Then, with Sephra carrying the baby behind him, he woke Tyrus
Jr. and Michael, dropping them out a window to a waiting neighbor.
When he turned around, Sephra wasn’t there – investigators would
later determine she’d gone to find Antonio. Before Tyrus could follow
them, an explosion knocked him to the floor. When he got to his burned
feet, the fire was so intense he was forced to retreat out the window.
Betty Burks got the call mere hours after she’d left her grandson’s
birthday party. When she arrived at the fire, she found her son curled
up on the ground, the apartment complex roaring in flames.
While paramedics took Tyrus and his two surviving sons to Parkland
Memorial Hospital, Betty watched 60 firefighters battle the blaze.
She prayed for a miracle but didn’t get one.
When the flames finally subsided, firefighters found the bodies of
Sephra and her two youngest children huddled together in Antonio’s
bedroom.
“I watched them bring my three people out in one bag,” Betty said.
Debilitating grief eventually led to outrage. City officials can
implement their own, stricter fire codes, and Dallas building code
inspectors had told the Colonial Tepeyac Apartments to install
multiple strobe light smoke alarms in the family’s unit. Instead,
property managers installed one at the top of a stairwell, not in the
bedroom and common areas as required.
Investigators determined having visual smoke alarms in the right
places would’ve given the family an extra 3 ½ minutes to get out of
the apartment, evidence that helped the Burkses and attorney Carmen
Mitchell win a multimillion dollar verdict against the apartment
management company.
But the lawsuit can’t give Tyrus and his sons back the life they
knew. The three of them still live with Betty – where they’ll remain
until Tyrus Jr. and Michael go off to college. And the boys visit the
graves of their mother and siblings for every birthday, wedding
anniversary and holiday, sometimes twice a month.
“It’s a pain that will be with us forever,” Betty told lawmakers last
week. “The deaf deserve as fair a chance in the case of an accident as
a hearing person.”
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