WINONA, Texas — A tragic house fire in Smith County claimed a mother’s life and her three children. Edwin Harris is the only person who survived the fire.
It started off as a snowed-in day at the home. "Without the weather being, you know, as different as it was, I would not have been home at all then," Harris said.
He was watching a childhood favorite movie of his “The Great Mouse Detective” on his phone with his one-year-old daughter, Saphira. The family lost power and was grateful to have their wood-burning stove to keep warm.
“We laid down to take a nap," Harris said. This is when he lost all concept of time.
Harris wasn't sure how much time had passed. “I just remember opening my bedroom door and seeing the smoke coming from the middle of the house," he said. "And my first instinct was to go outside and grab the water hose.”
When he stepped outside, his family wasn’t behind him. While in panic, he urged his girlfriend, Brittany Stewart, to leave the house.
"As I ran to the window, I was yelling at her, telling her to 'come out the window, come out the window'. I broke the windows and she kept saying that she couldn't,” Harris explained.
By this time first responders had arrived. It was all hands on deck to get inside the house and rescue his girlfriend, the three kids, their dog, Winter, and her 10 newborn puppies. The flames wouldn’t let anyone in.
“I even stuck the water hose in as far as I could and told them to grab hold. There was nothing. I didn’t get any replies,” he said. "They were gone."
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) took Harris to UT-Health Main Hospital to treat his cuts and minor burns.
While in the ambulance, “I was definitely hysterical and not able to grasp, you know, the reality of it. Moreover, everything was just my baby, you know,” Harris said.
He says his baby, one-year-old Saphira, was the funniest baby you’d ever meet. “Even her attitude was adorable,” he said.
His son, Travis, was two.
"He was very quiet. Back the last few weeks, he had been talking the most we've ever heard him talk," Harris said.
Eli was five. He wasn’t his son by blood, but Harris loved him like his own.
“Very vibrant, very energetic, thirsty for knowledge of all angles,” he described Eli.
The mother, Brittany Stewart, was a 24-year-old aspiring chef and a bookworm.
“She loved books she loved to read. She helped me reignite my reading passion. I've read more books in the four years that we've been together than I have probably the whole time in school, even including the ones I was assigned to read," he said. "We won't tell my teachers about that.”
As heartbreaking as this day was, Harris learned an important lesson.
We asked, “What do you want people to take away from your story?”
"Mainly that some things are unexplained, but the ‘why’ is not as important as the ‘what.’ Even in the end if we were to find out ‘why,’ it doesn’t change the result. So, it’s more so ‘what?’ What are we here for, what are we put on this earth to do, and how do we fulfill that?” He said.
He’s walking away from this tragedy with a new purpose and “Moo Cow,” the only one of the puppies that survived.
A GoFundMe account has been set up to raise money for Edwin.
