‘2020 couldn’t be any worse’: Those displaced in KC apartment fire try to find footing
The Facebook caption was straightforward: My apartment complex is on fire.
Flames sprang to life Monday evening at the Waldo Heights Apartments on Troost Avenue as Jordae Ferguson, 22, recorded the disaster on her phone.
“Oh my gosh,” Ferguson said on a Facebook live video, exhaling loudly. “This is crazy. Why is this happening? Like, 2020 couldn’t be any worse for me.”
She watched as two people were rescued from the third floor as fire crews were initially hindered by road access issues and a lack of hydrants in the area. The fire department later said they transported two people to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening after they leapt off the third floor to escape the flames.
The blaze, which is under investigation by a national response team with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, went on to displace about 30 families. The building was declared a complete loss.
Ferguson and her boyfriend, Marquis Williams, stood outside their apartment in sandals, watching flames jump from a section of the third floor, directly above the first floor unit they shared with her brother and sister.
Williams offered Ferguson his socks to keep her feet warm in the below freezing temperatures. Then a woman who lived nearby brought him a pair of her own. Later, the couple was among the building residents to take shelter in a nearby hotel.
Only minutes before, around 8 p.m., the couple had been lying in bed when they heard two pops, then someone started yelling “fire, fire!”
Ferguson, who works as an infant and toddler teacher at United Inner City Services Metro Center, said on the Facebook video that she was heart-broken as the fire spread and the sky above the building turn orange as a firefighter dashed by.
“I’m just hurt because everything in my apartment is gone and me and my boyfriend worked so hard for everything we just got and it’s gone like that,” she said.
They had escaped through their smoky hallway with only their shoes, coats and wallets.
As the building burned, Ferguson thought of the photo in her apartment of her late grandmother Joetta Beckman, who helped raise her. It showed the two of them in the kitchen baking Christmas cookies about 15 years ago, smiles wide and clothes filled with flour.
She thought about all the new Christmas gifts everyone in her building had received and worked so hard for, herself included. And she thought about the Patrick Mahomes jersey she bought herself earlier this year.
“This may sound silly, but I’m a die-hard Chiefs fan and I had my Mahomes jersey in there that I was really upset about,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday with The Star.
Ferguson got the jersey about a month after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win. She’d worked extra hours to save up for it, hoping to one day have it autographed by Mahomes himself.
In the year she’d lived there, Ferguson plastered her bedroom walls with Chiefs posters and kept a collection of Chiefs shirts. Then there were the things that didn’t cost much, but held personal value: her high school diploma, stuffed animals from her significant other.
There were the things she worked hard to save for, including nice couches, flat-screen TVs and brand new kitchenware.
“What do I do next?” she asked. “It’s hard and confusing to worry about how do I budget on what I get next.”
Ferguson’s second-floor neighbor, Angelika Scharp, 19, was working at Pizza Hut on Monday night when she got the call from her fiance.
“I’m stressed out, if I’m being completely honest, but I guess things are going as well as to be expected,” Scharp said in an interview Wednesday.
Her daughter, Surreal, who turns five next month, was with her fiance, Isaiah Ginter, and his younger brother, Ed Bailey, when they started to smell smoke. They all escaped safely, but left their four cats behind.
Scharp worries about her young child, who is now staying with family in Topeka until they find a new home.
“I don’t want one of her first memories to be her house burning down and her kitties passing away,” Scharp said, though she doesn’t know yet what condition the cats are in. “I don’t want it to traumatize her.”
They’re all anxious to search through the wreckage for the mother named Cookie, and the three kittens: Lock, Shock and Barrel, named after the trick-or-treaters in the Nightmare Before Christmas.
“It’s really frustrating also because nobody’s giving us a whole lot of detail,” Scharp said of the investigation. “They’re being very vague, so it’s hard to tell when we can go in.”
She recently drove past the now uninhabited structure, with the broken windows and the gutted third floor sitting like “an empty shell.”
“It’s going to take us years to recover from this,” Scharp said. “... It’s horrible because for years we’ve been working for this and I mean what did we really work for, you know? It’s all gone. There’s nothing to show for it.”
The Red Cross and Salvation Army have helped to feed, house and clothe those displaced, including Scharp and Ferguson.
But family and friends of both young women set up GoFundMe pages to help support them as they begin to rebuild their lives. Both said they’re grateful for the community’s generosity.
“I guess in a way we can start over, a fresh start—not that we really wanted one—but I guess new year, new us?” Scharp said half-heartedly as she sat in a hotel room Wednesday with her fiance, his brother and two board games they bought to pass the time.
The GoFundMe for Scharp can be found at https://www.gofundme.com/f/family-lost-everything-in-an-apartment-fire. GoFundMes for Ferguson can be found at https://www.gofundme.com/f/7dg5y3-jordans-fresh-start and https://www.gofundme.com/f/teacher-ms-jordae.
This story was originally published December 31, 2020 at 2:54 PM.
