Tammy Freitas had always wanted to remodel her home. Ten days
after the family’s tool shed caught fire and burned her house to
the ground, she said God must have wanted her to get a move on with
the project.
the family and their friends cleaning up the burnt wreckage.
Tammy Freitas had always wanted to remodel her home.
Ten days after the family’s tool shed caught fire and burned her house to the ground, she said God must have wanted her to get a move on with the project.
“A little over a week ago, my house was standing,” she said Saturday. “Now there’s nothing. But you just have to breathe in, breathe out and rebuild your life.”
Freitas rarely altered her gaze from the charred skeleton of her home – because there was work to be done.
The day before flames ravaged the hallways and walls, burned the kitchen and bathrooms and scorched the bedrooms and closets – her family had been at the house celebrating Freitas’ son Josh graduating from San Benito High School. A week full of tears and hard decisions has passed. And now, with friends and family gathered at the ruins of 951 Riverside Road, it was time to clean up the mess.
“God has protected us. He has protected my family,” Freitas said. “We’re all here, we’re all together. Now it’s time to rebuild.”
Where a home once stood
Each step through the blackened rubble crunched under the workers’ feet as pieces of carpet and picture frames, T-shirts and coffee mugs crumbled. There was a stench of burnt wood and tile, singed furniture and melted insulation, and the family worked through the wind-tossed ashes and dirt on the property as they picked up the home’s remaining pieces.
A few walls of the kitchen and master bathroom remained standing in a corner of the ruin, their blistered arms of wood still supporting a share of the now-consumed roof.
Once the fertilizer shed had caught fire, the rest of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom beige house didn’t stand a chance. Soon, propane tanks were exploding and Freitas’ sister’s Jeep burst into flames, even with more than a dozen firefighters battling the blaze for more than four hours. In the end, the fire took the house, five dogs and a lifetime of memories.
Freitas’ auburn hair was pulled back tight around a face smudged with ash. The lifelong Hollister resident and mother of two had lost everything she owned – but not everything she had.
“I truly believe God has blessed us,” she said. “No one was hurt. What we lost was stuff. It can all be replaced. You can’t replace a human life. I look at Josh – I couldn’t have standing losing that one. He’s my son. He’s my rock.”
Her other son, Private First-Class Justin Freitas, was on his way back from Iraq over the weekend for a three-week break to celebrate his birthday. The 21-year-old had lived his entire life at the house until he joined the Army, and his mother said the war has made him feel lucky he had a home so long.
Josh Freitas is a lively 18-year-old with a thin frame, sandy brown hair and a penchant for welding.
The recent San Benito High School graduate stood ankle deep in jagged wreckage and fired up an acetylene torch – he hopes to make good money as a welder someday. On Saturday, however, he was merely a son trying to help his family. Pulling down his dark visor, he started to cut away the steel peeling back from the blasted foundation.
“The day it happened it was crazy,” he said. “We got a call saying ‘your house is burning.’ But really, I don’t think about it too much. My parents always wanted to rebuild, and now they can.”
Washing away the past
Spirits were high and laughter was frequent among the 10 friends, neighbors and family members scurrying around the property, scooping up rubble and tossing it into trailers headed for the dump.
Words like “fresh start” and “new beginning” were repeated often by the workers and every time an unscathed book or intact kitchen utensil was found – which was seldom – heads turned and words of encouragement followed.
Help came not only from tried-and-true friends, but even from strangers. San Juan resident Jerry Tatro stopped by with a tractor and having met the family about an hour earlier, he spent his Saturday on the machine grabbing bunches of warped metal and heavy wreckage and dropping it in a garbage trailer.
Of course, there were friends helping, too.
Kim Correia has been friends with the Freitas family for 12 years. Her two sons, also named Josh and Justin, have been a fixture at the Freitas house since two of the boys went to Sunnyslope Elementary School together in second grade.
Correia’s constant smile quivered occasionally while she sorted through the home’s salvageable materials, which amounted to a few photo albums, yearbooks and a quilt Freitas had made with friends from church.
“I drove up here – my heart was hurting the whole way. When I saw it, tears came to my eyes,” Correia said. “It’s hard to believe we were all just here for Josh’s graduation party.”
Photographs left in stacks were burned around their edges, while faces were recognizable enough to save them from going to waste. Correia carefully pried apart the fused pictures, prompting memories.
“Look how handsome the boys look here,” Correia said, pointing to a photo of her and Tammy’s sons grinning. “This is so hard.”
The crew, despite the situation, the emotions, remained high in spirits.
Josh Freitas’ girlfriend, Nicky Gere, also was adept at handling a cutting torch. She sometimes paused at the better-preserved mementos.
“Hey, we found some of your homemade jams, Tammy,” Gere called out, pointing to a jar of bright, orange, apricot spread. “Think it’s still good?”
Freitas didn’t look at the jar of jam. Instead she shouldered another heavy piece of her charred house and threw it in the trash pile.
“No hon’ – it’s probably bad,” Freitas said. “I’ll just have to start over.”
