June 7, 2025 marks 31 years since the life altering experience of losing a home in a fire. I was a year out from law school and had been a licensed attorney for less than a year. I arrived home at about 10:45 pm to learn my home was gone in a fire. I was not there when the fire broke out about 4:45 pm just as the work day was ending. A woman was grilling food when the gas tank malfunctioned blew up a ball of fire that went up over the wall, over the roof and down in. There was no loss of human life, but over 40 people were left unhoused.
When the firealarm rang out, my neighbor, a graduate student from Turkey and his friends, mostly also international students, left the apartment building and then went back in and back up to the third floor. They thought I was in my apartment. They kicked the door to see wall to wall flames and could not enter. My neighbor and I only knew each other to wave hi in the hallways as we came and went from work, errands, and life.
So, I was not at home when the fire broke out. I lived in Manchester, New Hampshire and worked as a newly minted attorney in Concord, New Hampshire. June 7, 1994 was a Tuesday. On Tuesdays I went north to Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth, where I graduated from college is in Hanover. So, every week on Tuesdays, after work, I went to Dartmouth for an oboe lesson with my college oboe teacher, Neil Boyer. Neil and I got dinner after the lesson, and that made me later to get back to Manchester. It was over an hour's drive as Manchester is about 75 miles south of Hanover.
The reason that I still have my oboe today is because I headed to Dartmouth just as the fire broke out. My oboe is a special instrument. Before my oboe retired to life with a talented amateur, my oboe belonged to Gladys Elliott who was my high school teacher and, way more importantly, the legendary principal oboist in the Chicago Lyric Opera. Life as a courtroom attorney crime fighter has always caused me to need some breaks. But I try to keep oboe in my life. My talents did not take me to professional oboist ranks after amazing times as a high school and college musician. But I believe I am intended to play oboe since I did not just survive the fire by not being there. I survived it because I was at Dartmouth playing oboe and still had the oboe but not, for example, a fancy camera I had received as a gift for photography.
So, around 5:30pm, the apartment building management figured out my Toyota Camry with the “oboe” vanity plate, was not in the parking lot. They called my parents, who were my emergency contacts. The manager asked them where I was and stated they could not find my car so they did not THINK I was home at the time. Not reassured by this line of inquiry, my distraught parents had had to wait about five or six hours for me to call to confirm I was indeed still alive on the planet in this life.
Red Cross disaster relief volunteers were on site to greet me when I arrived at my apartment and received the message to call my parents as soon as I could get to a landline phone. Red Cross put me up in a hotel that night. The following day, Red Cross gave me a voucher so I could buy clothing at Sears. It was something like $75 dollars. They would have helped me with more hotel shelter, but I was able to set up staying with a partner at the law firm where I was working and also house sitting for a few weeks while I got into a new apartment.
I will never forget the disaster relief interview that led to the clothing voucher. Half of the apartment building just had some water damage and half had serious damage. About a quarter of the units were mostly rubble. My apartment was in that lot. From some of the confusion on the ground and some quirks in the apartment unit letters, the Red Cross representative at first thought I was among the massively inconvenienced who could mostly retrieve property from the unit. I spend some extra time explaining clearly that my unit was among the decimated units, and I was without clothing for the foreseeable future. I remain grateful to this day for Red Cross's charity to me in the immediate aftermath of the fire, but the situation also gave me the smallest taste of navigating a bureaucracy during a crisis.
So, in addition to loving family and friends, I had good material resources --a good job and renters insurance. And I was not there and never directly in physical danger and have the comfort that people I barely knew tried to come to my aid when they thought I was in the apartment. The fire still qualifies the most wrenching experience and one that caused some emotional suffering for me. The apartment building had a strong acrid smell, so overwhelming it felt like you could taste the ashes. I did have to sort through the rubble to pull out some jewelry and my paternal grandmother's charred rocking chair that I had refurbished. For about six months, the smell of anything burning would put me back to that smell. For a couple years, I would jump and freeze when I heard a siren. It took a couple months for me to catalog and document everything down to the last teaspoon I had lost for the insurance claim.
When I graduated from law school in 1993, my parents had given me my grandfather's law desk and my grandmother's dining room set, both of which had meant a great deal to each grandparent. . These were lost in the fire. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, I had some difficulties processing that these were just things. I had this great fear that I would lose all memories of departed family members. I am the first woman lawyer in my family in a generations of lawyers, and my grandfather was the lawyer member of the family who I knew. My parents named me Elizabeth Virginia for each of my grandmothers, one of whom had died my senior year in college and the other my second year in law school. Because I had lost my grandparents things of significance that brought memories of them, I had an irrational sense of guilt for having broken some kind of trust and faith with them.
A few months after the fire my mom mailed me some childhood mementos, and one of them, had shattered. I felt like I personally had broken apart. The first Saturday after I finished all the documentation for the insurance claim, I can remember sinking to the floor after a phone call, and just sitting there dazed feeling that every single muscle cell in body ached.
The fire was clarifying for my legal career as it set me on a trajectory that led to my first job in public service as a public defender less than two years later. The fire also put me on the path to move back to Virginia, which I had left reluctantly to for a job with a law firm in a difficult hiring climate. The two years I spent in New Hampshire are the only years I have lived outside Virginia since 1989. When I moved back to Virginia, I moved to Fredericksburg. I was lucky to pick Fredericksburg. A law school friend's parents in the Fredericksburg area needed a house sitter for a few weeks. Fredericksburg was close enough to my law school to help with my employment search. Fredericksburg was equidistant from Richmond and Washington, DC. where I thought I would find employment. But I fell in love with Fredericksburg and found my first public service law job right here in Fredericksburg at the Fredericksburg Public Defender Office. About a year and a half after I got to Fredericksburg, I noticed I could hear a siren without jumping, and the smell of something burning did not make me flash back to the apartment building.
In Fredericksburg, I began to thrive in a new life as a public service attorney.
I have mentioned on Facebook, and I will save for another post, that I pull on the experience of the fire and the road back for understanding how to find justice as a prosecutor.
When the firealarm rang out, my neighbor, a graduate student from Turkey and his friends, mostly also international students, left the apartment building and then went back in and back up to the third floor. They thought I was in my apartment. They kicked the door to see wall to wall flames and could not enter. My neighbor and I only knew each other to wave hi in the hallways as we came and went from work, errands, and life.
So, I was not at home when the fire broke out. I lived in Manchester, New Hampshire and worked as a newly minted attorney in Concord, New Hampshire. June 7, 1994 was a Tuesday. On Tuesdays I went north to Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth, where I graduated from college is in Hanover. So, every week on Tuesdays, after work, I went to Dartmouth for an oboe lesson with my college oboe teacher, Neil Boyer. Neil and I got dinner after the lesson, and that made me later to get back to Manchester. It was over an hour's drive as Manchester is about 75 miles south of Hanover.
The reason that I still have my oboe today is because I headed to Dartmouth just as the fire broke out. My oboe is a special instrument. Before my oboe retired to life with a talented amateur, my oboe belonged to Gladys Elliott who was my high school teacher and, way more importantly, the legendary principal oboist in the Chicago Lyric Opera. Life as a courtroom attorney crime fighter has always caused me to need some breaks. But I try to keep oboe in my life. My talents did not take me to professional oboist ranks after amazing times as a high school and college musician. But I believe I am intended to play oboe since I did not just survive the fire by not being there. I survived it because I was at Dartmouth playing oboe and still had the oboe but not, for example, a fancy camera I had received as a gift for photography.
So, around 5:30pm, the apartment building management figured out my Toyota Camry with the “oboe” vanity plate, was not in the parking lot. They called my parents, who were my emergency contacts. The manager asked them where I was and stated they could not find my car so they did not THINK I was home at the time. Not reassured by this line of inquiry, my distraught parents had had to wait about five or six hours for me to call to confirm I was indeed still alive on the planet in this life.
Red Cross disaster relief volunteers were on site to greet me when I arrived at my apartment and received the message to call my parents as soon as I could get to a landline phone. Red Cross put me up in a hotel that night. The following day, Red Cross gave me a voucher so I could buy clothing at Sears. It was something like $75 dollars. They would have helped me with more hotel shelter, but I was able to set up staying with a partner at the law firm where I was working and also house sitting for a few weeks while I got into a new apartment.
I will never forget the disaster relief interview that led to the clothing voucher. Half of the apartment building just had some water damage and half had serious damage. About a quarter of the units were mostly rubble. My apartment was in that lot. From some of the confusion on the ground and some quirks in the apartment unit letters, the Red Cross representative at first thought I was among the massively inconvenienced who could mostly retrieve property from the unit. I spend some extra time explaining clearly that my unit was among the decimated units, and I was without clothing for the foreseeable future. I remain grateful to this day for Red Cross's charity to me in the immediate aftermath of the fire, but the situation also gave me the smallest taste of navigating a bureaucracy during a crisis.
So, in addition to loving family and friends, I had good material resources --a good job and renters insurance. And I was not there and never directly in physical danger and have the comfort that people I barely knew tried to come to my aid when they thought I was in the apartment. The fire still qualifies the most wrenching experience and one that caused some emotional suffering for me. The apartment building had a strong acrid smell, so overwhelming it felt like you could taste the ashes. I did have to sort through the rubble to pull out some jewelry and my paternal grandmother's charred rocking chair that I had refurbished. For about six months, the smell of anything burning would put me back to that smell. For a couple years, I would jump and freeze when I heard a siren. It took a couple months for me to catalog and document everything down to the last teaspoon I had lost for the insurance claim.
When I graduated from law school in 1993, my parents had given me my grandfather's law desk and my grandmother's dining room set, both of which had meant a great deal to each grandparent. . These were lost in the fire. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, I had some difficulties processing that these were just things. I had this great fear that I would lose all memories of departed family members. I am the first woman lawyer in my family in a generations of lawyers, and my grandfather was the lawyer member of the family who I knew. My parents named me Elizabeth Virginia for each of my grandmothers, one of whom had died my senior year in college and the other my second year in law school. Because I had lost my grandparents things of significance that brought memories of them, I had an irrational sense of guilt for having broken some kind of trust and faith with them.
A few months after the fire my mom mailed me some childhood mementos, and one of them, had shattered. I felt like I personally had broken apart. The first Saturday after I finished all the documentation for the insurance claim, I can remember sinking to the floor after a phone call, and just sitting there dazed feeling that every single muscle cell in body ached.
The fire was clarifying for my legal career as it set me on a trajectory that led to my first job in public service as a public defender less than two years later. The fire also put me on the path to move back to Virginia, which I had left reluctantly to for a job with a law firm in a difficult hiring climate. The two years I spent in New Hampshire are the only years I have lived outside Virginia since 1989. When I moved back to Virginia, I moved to Fredericksburg. I was lucky to pick Fredericksburg. A law school friend's parents in the Fredericksburg area needed a house sitter for a few weeks. Fredericksburg was close enough to my law school to help with my employment search. Fredericksburg was equidistant from Richmond and Washington, DC. where I thought I would find employment. But I fell in love with Fredericksburg and found my first public service law job right here in Fredericksburg at the Fredericksburg Public Defender Office. About a year and a half after I got to Fredericksburg, I noticed I could hear a siren without jumping, and the smell of something burning did not make me flash back to the apartment building.
In Fredericksburg, I began to thrive in a new life as a public service attorney.
I have mentioned on Facebook, and I will save for another post, that I pull on the experience of the fire and the road back for understanding how to find justice as a prosecutor.