Champaign family to resume 'smoke alarm blitzes' after son's death in 2016 fire
May 17—CHAMPAIGN — After pandemic restrictions prevented Joy Sheehan from facilitating her annual blitz of installing smoke detectors in Champaign homes in 2020, she wasn't sure if she would be able to pick up the campaign again.
But after reaching out to the Champaign Fire Department early this year and receiving "110 percent" support, Sheehan is now seeking volunteers to help resume the drive that aims to ensure no other person in the city dies in a house fire as her son did in 2016.
"Being able to go into someone's home and put a smoke alarm in, it helps to know that you're trying to bring some good from the loss that you had," Sheehan said. "I meanm it's never going to bring him back, it's never going to heal me, but like I said, to hear his name and know — it's just, that all matters."
Christian Sheehan was 23 when he and another occupant, Sara Shuler, 26, died from inhaling smoke in a March 2016 house fire in the 1800 block of Cypress Drive.
Since then, Sheehan and Champaign firefighters have installed nearly 1,000 smoke detectors in Champaign homes through the course of three subsequent "smoke alarm blitzes."
"It's like the old saying, no one's really gone as long as you remember them," Deputy fire Chief Jeremy Mitchell said. "For being as young as he was, he has had an outsized impact on this town through what his parents have been able to do."
The coalition is now seeking volunteers to go door to door from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday to install smoke alarms and carbon-monoxide detectors in homes that don't have them in the neighborhood north of Douglass Park.
Volunteers are set to meet at the Douglass Community Center, 512 E. Grove St., to get training from firefighters before they aim to install an estimated 300 smoke alarms across 100 residences.
Mitchell emphasized that long-term fire safety requires more than just firefighters responding to blazes after they've started.
The rate of structure fires in Champaign has increased by about 20 percent over the past 15 years, and before 2021, the city was seeing 1 to 1.5 fatal fires on average each year.
But Champaign has not seen a fatal fire in the past three years, and Mitchell attributed that in part to the department's increased prevention efforts since it received a federal grant in 2022 for distributing smoke alarms.
The devices are often the first and last line of defense in a house fire, Mitchell said, and reduce the risk of death by half. Now, whenever someone in the city is injured in a fire, the fire department has duffel bags of smoke detectors.
Amid those efforts, the deputy chief said Sheehan's campaign is one of the department's biggest models for getting smoke detectors into homes; unlike in commercial spaces, it can be difficult to enforce proper fire safety in private residences.
Sheehan ran her first blitz in the Southwood neighborhood where Christian passed away. The coalition then distributed smoke alarms around Centennial Park in 2018 and in the Garden Hills neighborhood in 2019.
The neighborhood north of Douglass Park was chosen this year because records show it has a high rate of cooking fires, Mitchell said.
Sheehan said the campaign requires volunteers to be tenacious to convince people to open their homes and accept the potentially life-saving tools.
But ultimately, Sheehan said she's excited to see her children and Christian's friends return home once again to knock on doors.
While her humble son would have been averse to seeing his face on posters, his mother said she is absolutely confident he would have loved to see so many different people come together for a good cause.
"I love being able to spread the awareness and help. Hopefully, another family doesn't have to go through what we've had to go through," Sheehan said. "For us, it's very meaningful and helps us, just to say his name."
