No warning: Neighbors blame police, fire after deadly Missouri gas explosion
In the aftermath of a deadly gas explosion, it is the laughing cackle that particularly rankles Lexington, Missouri’s Jacob Peckham.
His neighbor’s house on Franklin Avenue, with a family inside, had just erupted, turned to rubble as flames leaped into the evening sky.
Five year-old Alistair Lamb lay dead from the April 9 blast while his father, Jacob Cunningham, and 10-year-old, sister, Camillia “Cami” Lamb — each profoundly burned — were airlifted to separate Kansas City area hospitals, where both still remain.
Glass erupted from the windows of at least 20 surrounding homes.
On Tuesday, five days after the tragedy, Peckham was one of numerous neighbors expressing little more than disgust and disappointment at what they now strongly believe to be the city’s lax and negligent handling of a gas line break. They point to the fact that, despite the widespread odor of natural gas through much of the afternoon, neighbors received no warnings of danger.
Some three hours passed from the time a subcontractor hit the gas line, Liberty Utilities was on site to fix it, and the explosion that occurred at around 7:45 p.m.
No knocks on neighbors’ doors by police or fire officials.
No prior calls or warning to evacuate.
Lexington neighbors angry
Then there is the laugh.
Peckham called up a video taken from the outside security camera of his neighbors, David King and Amanda Phifer, from 8:50 p.m. following the explosion at 17th Street and Franklin Avenue. The video begins with an off-camera laugh — it is unclear from whom — as Lexington police and fire personnel go door-to-door for the first time that day, checking on nearby residents, roughly an hour after the blast.
“They don’t look like they’re very urgent,” Peckham said matter-of-factly of the check on his neighbors, who were not in the house in that moment. They had rushed west to the site of the explosion. “You hear them laughing and carrying on, or whatever. Like it was just a joke. . .
“As far as a warning, that’s all they did. They (police and fire) didn’t come around until, I want to say, 9 o’clock and tell us to evacuate — until after the fact.”
No warning came before the explosion, Peckham and multiple residents attested.
“They could have evacuated to prevent the loss of that little boy, and prevented the pain and suffering for the two that got burned really bad,” Peckham’s spouse Heather, said. “They could have evacuated and nobody would have got hurt.”
Residents called police
City officials said they have been asked to cede all communication on the explosion to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating as part of its role governing the transport of gas and other hazardous materials through pipelines.
But earlier this week, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway suggested that the city’s first responders would have had responsibility for warnings or evacuations.
In one call to the Lexington Police Department Wednesday, an employee answering the phone initially said to direct questions to the NTSB, then came back on and said she’d transfer the call to “Central Dispatch.”
Later in the day, a dispatcher said she would give a message to Police Chief Josh Coen. He did not call back.
A message left for Lexington Fire Chief Jim Martin was not immediately returned.
Shawnna Funderburk, Lexington city administrator, wrote to The Star, “The City will not be doing any interviews. This is now an NTSB investigation. The NTSB wants all media requests to go directly to the NTSB.”
Numerous residents, including a neighbor living across from the destroyed Cunningham home, said that, prior to the explosion, they had been smelling gas from about 4:15 p.m. — when a subcontractor laying fiber optic cable reported hitting a gas line — to about 7:45 p.m., when the Cunningham’s rental home exploded. The blast also destroyed each of the homes on either side of Cunningham’s.
On Tuesday afternoon, heavy machinery — two yellow excavators — were at work filling buckets of the remains of those homes, dropping them into trucks to be hauled away.
One neighbor, who asked that his name not be used, as he was seeking legal advice regarding the event, said that he called Lexington police around 5 p.m. out of concern for general safety.
“I called them. Multiple people called them,” said the neighbor. “I know multiple people were calling saying they smelled gas.”
He said authorities did not speak of any possible danger and only said that a gas line had been hit and was under repair.
“They told us there was a gas leak, but nothing else,” his spouse said. “And we had to call them.”
The man and his family were in their yard when the air quaked from a massive boom. A cloud of black smoke and fire rose from the site.
“I mean, in a second you could feel the heat,” his wife said. “It was huge. It could have easily been our house.”
Liberty Utilities
Cindy Howard, who has lived on Franklin Avenue with her husband in a 1904 home for 27 years, was inside while Liberty Utilities was working to repair the gas line. She lives only a few houses east of the Cunninghams’ home and did not smell gas inside her home.
She also attests that no one came to her door to tell her that a gas repair was in process.
“I didn’t even know anything was going on until the explosion,” she said.
She, too, wonders why there was no warning.
“Given what has happened, they probably should have done that,” Howard said. “It should have been in some kind of emergency operation manual or something, right?”
Amanda Phifer, whose home security camera captured first responders coming to her door, was in her yard when she heard the explosion.
“I was outside cleaning out my car when I felt the boom,” she said. “I stood there for a second because, I’m like, ‘What just happened?’ Then I ran over there, My husband ran out of the house without shoes on. . .I can’t look down there without crying and getting upset.
“It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened. We smelled it hours before that, before the house blew up. Nobody knocked on the door door. No, nothing. The police officer was playing with the lady’s dog over here. They should have said something, warned us. I’m angry about it.
“My husband and a couple of dads went up there to try to look for the little boy. They dug through the rubble. We’re all messed up from this.”
Gas explosion. Flames. Black Cloud
Neighbors Jacob and Heather Peckham had just left their home and were headed to Kansas City when the gas ignited. Their son Daniel Peckham, 17, was in Lexington at work. Luke Peckham, 14, was alone at home.
The boom shook the air.
“A bunch of my friends were blowing up my phone saying, ‘Dude, there’s a big cloud of smoke rolling above your house,’” Daniel said.
Luke Peckham phoned his father, alarmed, telling him, “A house blew up!”
“I say, ‘You better be more specific,’” his father recalled. They turned the car around. “’Are you talking about my house or somebody else’s?’” His son said, no, a neighbor’s, and ran down the block to snap a photo. Flames were licking the upper branches of tall trees.
Peckham casts blame for the explosion on numerous entities, from Liberty Utilities, to the fiber optic cable company, to the subcontractor hired by Sellenriek Construction to lay cable, to the company that mapped the site.
“The fire department was on site. The police department was on site. The city should have taken care of something,” Peckham said.
Sellenriek’s CEO Steve Sellenreik maintains that the subcontractor followed all procedures and that the digging site was improperly mapped.
Who is negligent?
Joann Sanford lives about a block from the explosion.
“A vanity mirror flew off the wall and across the room,” she said. “Two windows in my bedroom exploded. I mean, a gas explosion was the furthest thing I could have imagined.”
Asked if she received any warning, she held up her fingers in a circle: Zero.
She’s angry.
“From what I understand, they knew earlier in the day that there was some kind of leak,” Sanford said. “I would have hoped that, at the very least, in this close proximity, there would have been a note on the door — someone, something, to tell us that there was something going on. . . .
“I mean, I have a gas stove. I could have been cooking dinner. You just think of the worst. It feels like there should have been some kind of warning.”
She noted the three-plus hours that passed from the time the gas line was hit and the explosion.
“I think everybody’s pretty frustrated,” she said. She shared what she felt was a relevant story. Her sister, living in Lexington, was having a swimming pool dug in their back yard last summer. But it had also been incorrectly mapped. She said the construction crew stopped digging within inches of also hitting her sister’s gas main.
“What it says to me is that their maps are outdated or incorrect or something is wrong,” Sanford said. Her sister postponed the swimming pool.
George Stier, whose lives in an 1854 home that once belonged to World War II Maj. Gen. Earl Hoag, and to Stier’s family since 1960, is not ready to cast blame. But he, too, said nobody knocked on his door to offer any warnings. He had driven by and seen that the police had blocked off access to the area around the digging site round 4 p.m.
Hours later, the area exploded.
“That’s the part that I can’t get my head wrapped around — why people weren’t notified,” he said. “I’m not trying to pick the town apart, or the police.”
At least not specifically. As for negligence:
“Well, somebody was,” Stier said. “Hello, it’s going to be a massive lawsuit.”
This story was originally published April 17, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
