Melissa McMullin texted her son “goodbye.” She barricaded the door to her bedroom, opened a gas can and tipped its contents over herself, her clothes, her bed, the floor. The air was thick with the acrid, dizzying fumes, her clothing so drenched it clung to her skin.
Then the 44-year-old California woman lay on her soaked mattress, lighter in hand, and clicked.
“She was feeling desperate,” Cyndi Foreman, the fire prevention specialist tasked with investigating the Sunday blaze that consumed McMullin’s entire apartment complex and nearly took her life, told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. “She didn’t want to live.”
According to Foreman, McMullin was facing eviction next month and was attempting to commit suicide.
McMullin’s lighter’s flickering orange flame caught on the gasoline-doused fabric of her bed. In an instant, it erupted into an inferno. And in that same instant, McMullin apparently realized she’d made a terrible mistake.
She tried to escape through a bedroom window, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, but couldn’t make it out. The flames licked at her arms and feet. Smoke clogged the air. The oxygen cannisters that she had on hand for health reasons began to burst.
At last, a neighbor at her apartment complex told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, McMullin’s son Robert “came running around the other side of the house out of nowhere like a superhero.”
When he found her door locked, the young man broke his mother’s window and stepped back to let his mother’s boyfriend dash in.
But the boyfriend emerged a moment later. He needed a hose, he told Robert McMullin; Melissa was burning.
So Robert ran in and attempted to drag his mother out himself.
“The house was exploding,” he told KRON.
Melissa McMullin made it out of the fire with her life, though she suffered third degree burns to her hands and feet and is now being treated at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, according to the Chronicle. She was lucky: her clothes were too damp from the gasoline to catch fire, Foreman said.
The same cannot be said of her home. The four-unit apartment complex, which was home to McMullin, her son, and about 10 others, went up in flames. Santa Rosa Battalion Chief Ken Sebastiani told the Chronicle that the fire totally destroyed two units and caused smoke damage to the remaining ones. The cost of repairs is expected to be at least $500,000.
On Monday morning, residents returned to see what they could salvage from the wreckage. It wasn’t much.
“It’s a shock. Most everything is completely destroyed,” Charletta Colon, who has lived there for six years or so with her mother, stepfather and sister, told the Press-Democrat.
Lost were scores of everyday items, as well as things less easily replaced: her great-grandmother’s teapots, some old family jewelry. The best sentimental object Colon was able to find was a photo album.
“I’m grateful for even that,” she said.
She and her neighbors are still reeling from the unexpected loss of their homes. Colon said that McMullin had a reputation for “tantrums” (Foreman said that the woman was due to be evicted because of ongoing disputes with neighbors), but it was still “really shocking she would do something like this.”
“We were like a big family here,” she said.
According to the Press-Democrat, McMullin confessed to investigators Monday that she started the fire. She has not yet been charged with a crime, but Foreman told KRON those are coming.
“The challenge is the mental health side of it, but there will be charges,” she said.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and county mental health service workers are assisting the Central Fire Authority with their investigation.
“I’ve never seen someone try to commit suicide by lighting themselves on fire,” Foreman told the Chronicle. “It’s a very tragic story.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Sarah Kaplan
