Lubbock family asking for help after house fire

LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - Police were called to 5026 E FM 40 on Sunday evening around 5 p.m. to help someone reporting heart attack symptoms, the start of a family tragedy that no one could have imagined.

Now that family is asking for your help.

“I got a call from my cousin who lives here with my grandparents and said that my grandpa’s having a heart attack or what they thought was a heart attack, so the ambulance came and they took him to UMC so I went to meet them up there,” Ashley Terrell said.

Ashley Terrell waited in the UMC waiting room for two hours while her grandfather was being treated. When there was nothing more she could do, she eventually went home to make dinner for her kids.

“While I was there somebody came knocking on my door saying ‘Hey there’s a lot of cops at your grandparents’ house’” Terrell said.

Terrell lives directly behind her grandparents and when she realized their home had caught fire she ran out the back door.

“By the time I got here, I guess it was a random citizen just running through the back trying to see if anyone was in the house, and as I stood in the front yard, they brought my aunt out and she was unresponsive,” Terrell said.

Terrell’s aunt, Rhonda, was in the hospital on life support until Thursday morning, but even in death she was able to give to others.

“They took her off life support and she was able to give two kidneys and a heart to somebody else,” Terrell said.

With Terrell’s grandfather still in recovery at UMC, they told him what had happened.

“At the same time that she passed, he’s now up to ICU level, probably because of his heartbreak,” she said.

Now the family is trying to cope and deal with the aftermath. The family is asking for help cleaning up, reaching out to construction workers, trying to collect extra supplies from job sites, or anything people can spare.

Terrell is asking for a few more hands to help get the house back in order, so her grandparents can return home.

If you are interested in helping, the family will begin clean up Sunday, July 9, and anyone is welcome to come by. If you want to donate to the family’s GoFundMe you can find that link here.