Dallas man who lost wife, kids in fire seeks visual smoke alarms for
\ndeaf tenants<\/p>\n
April 16, 2009<\/p>\n
By EMILY RAMSHAW \/ The Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n
eramshaw@dallasnews.com<\/p>\n
AUSTIN \u2013 When the raging late-night electrical fire broke out,
\nTyrus Burks, who is deaf, couldn’t hear an alarm sound. The alarm’s
\nflashing light \u2013 tucked by apartment managers into a stairwell \u2013
\nalso didn’t wake him or his sleeping wife.<\/p>\n
By the time the flames reached him, it was all he could do to rouse
\nhis oldest sons from bed. When his mother arrived at the scene of the
\nWest Dallas apartment blaze, she found Tyrus curled in the fetal
\nposition on the asphalt, his deaf high school sweetheart and two more
\nof their children trapped inside.<\/p>\n
Four years after Tyrus, now 31, lost half of his family in that fire,
\nhe is determined to save other deaf people from a similar fate. He was
\nin Austin last week pushing legislation to require property managers
\nto install fire alarms with flashing lights in the bedrooms and common
\nareas of hearing-impaired people who request them \u2013 a bill named for
\nhis wife, Sephra.<\/p>\n
“I wasn’t able to find my babies and wife and save them,” Tyrus told
\nlawmakers through a sign language interpreter. “If I had just had a
\nlittle bit more time, I know they would be with me today.”<\/p>\n
Today, the state property code requires landlords to install audible
\nsmoke alarms, not visual ones.<\/p>\n
The Sephra Burks bill, authored by Dallas Sen. Royce West, requires
\nproperty managers to buy and install visual smoke alarms if a tenant
\nwith a hearing impairment requests it \u2013 and to put them in highly
\nvisible locations, including bedrooms.<\/p>\n
The bill awaits a vote in both the House and the Senate.<\/p>\n
Apartment managers say they support the bill and can handle the
\nexpense. The deaf routinely wake up to flashing lights \u2013 it’s how
\nmany of their alarm clocks are outfitted. And studies show audible
\nsmoke alarms often aren’t loud enough to wake children younger than
\n10.<\/p>\n
“We feel like it is certainly the right thing to do,” said George
\nAllen, executive vice president of the Texas Apartment Association.
\n“We just want to make sure when the request is made that there is a
\nreal need for the device.”<\/p>\n
Tyrus and Sephra met in a Samuell High School program for
\nhearing-impaired students and quickly fell in love. They attended the
\nTexas School for the Deaf in Austin, got married back in Dallas, and
\nhad four children, none of whom were deaf.<\/p>\n
On a January night in 2005, the Burks family celebrated little
\nAntonio’s third birthday with dinner at a pizza restaurant. Afterward,
\nTyrus and Sephra tucked Antonio, Tyrus Jr., then 7, and Michael, 6,
\ninto their beds and fell asleep. Tyrus rose in the night to feed
\ninfant Viviana a bottle, then went downstairs to the living room of
\ntheir two-story apartment, where he dozed off in front of the
\ntelevision.<\/p>\n
He woke to find the room thick with smoke and the couch in flames,
\nthe result, fire investigators later determined, of a faulty power
\nstrip. Tyrus tried, unsuccessfully, to put the fire out. Then he
\nstumbled upstairs to find the children.<\/p>\n
Tyrus started in Antonio’s room, but the smoke was so thick he
\ncouldn’t find him. He went to rouse Sephra, who was in bed with the
\nbaby. Then, with Sephra carrying the baby behind him, he woke Tyrus
\nJr. and Michael, dropping them out a window to a waiting neighbor.<\/p>\n
When he turned around, Sephra wasn’t there \u2013 investigators would
\nlater determine she’d gone to find Antonio. Before Tyrus could follow
\nthem, an explosion knocked him to the floor. When he got to his burned
\nfeet, the fire was so intense he was forced to retreat out the window.<\/p>\n
Betty Burks got the call mere hours after she’d left her grandson’s
\nbirthday party. When she arrived at the fire, she found her son curled
\nup on the ground, the apartment complex roaring in flames.<\/p>\n
While paramedics took Tyrus and his two surviving sons to Parkland
\nMemorial Hospital, Betty watched 60 firefighters battle the blaze.<\/p>\n
She prayed for a miracle but didn’t get one.<\/p>\n
When the flames finally subsided, firefighters found the bodies of
\nSephra and her two youngest children huddled together in Antonio’s
\nbedroom.<\/p>\n
“I watched them bring my three people out in one bag,” Betty said.<\/p>\n
Debilitating grief eventually led to outrage. City officials can
\nimplement their own, stricter fire codes, and Dallas building code
\ninspectors had told the Colonial Tepeyac Apartments to install
\nmultiple strobe light smoke alarms in the family’s unit. Instead,
\nproperty managers installed one at the top of a stairwell, not in the
\nbedroom and common areas as required.<\/p>\n
Investigators determined having visual smoke alarms in the right
\nplaces would’ve given the family an extra 3 \u00bd minutes to get out of
\nthe apartment, evidence that helped the Burkses and attorney Carmen
\nMitchell win a multimillion dollar verdict against the apartment
\nmanagement company.<\/p>\n
But the lawsuit can’t give Tyrus and his sons back the life they
\nknew. The three of them still live with Betty \u2013 where they’ll remain
\nuntil Tyrus Jr. and Michael go off to college. And the boys visit the
\ngraves of their mother and siblings for every birthday, wedding
\nanniversary and holiday, sometimes twice a month.<\/p>\n
“It’s a pain that will be with us forever,” Betty told lawmakers last
\nweek. “The deaf deserve as fair a chance in the case of an accident as
\na hearing person.”<\/p>\n
Source:<\/p>\n