'Shattered': After South Bend house fire killed his six kids, father shares what he saw

SOUTH BEND — Many nights, David Smith will drive his car to a church parking lot on South Bend's west side where, just across LaPorte Avenue, he sees the charred husk of the two-story home that held him and his six young children for a few months.

"Don't think I'm crazy," Smith said, "but, you know, I just talk to them. I say, 'How are you babies doing today? Hope God's taking good care of y'all and you're enjoying yourself in heaven.'"

He savors any moment he can feel close to his six late children, who died after a fire consumed the home at 222 N. LaPorte Ave. on Jan. 21. He felt that way on a recent cool and windy afternoon, too, standing next to the mausoleum that holds their ashes at Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens, a verdant riverside cemetery in Osceola.

'I want to be buried with them': Dad of 6 kids lost in house fire can't access or control money in private Smith Family Memorial Fund

The remains of the three youngest kids rest in one tomb and the three oldest in another, with one vacant crypt in the middle. That one is reserved for their 67-year-old father.

Although he finds it wrong that a Smith Family Memorial Fund started by community leaders seems unlikely to pay the nearly $15,000 expense, Smith plans to spend his own money to be buried there. Nearly $300 of each monthly Social Security payment of about $450 he receives is going toward his future resting place.

He said he wants to go into the afterlife with his arms around his babies.

But he prefers to feel his children's presence in the urns he keeps at home. That way, when grief floods over him, he can let it carry him away for a while.

What the father remembers from the fire

He can't help but remember the snowy Sunday evening of the fire, when he says he was lounging around upstairs and watching movies with all of the kids: 11-year-old Angel, 10-year-old Demetris, 9-year-old Davida, 5-year-old Deontay, 4-year-old D'Angelo and 17-month-old Faith.

Smith children: A YouTuber. A 'jungle boy.' A bossy baby. Read more about the six late Smith children.

Smith said he wishes he knew more about what happened. What he does remember, he says, is that his youngest boy, D'Angelo, left the room to use the bathroom. When he came back, he said he had smelled smoke.

Smith told him to quit messing around. The father asked Demetris to open the bedroom door so his dad could look out in the hallway.

He saw smoke.

"That's when I started gathering all the kids to try to find a way out," Smith said. "But when we tried to go down the stairs, the smoke and flames drew us back up."

Soon, he says, thick black smoke was clouding his vision and his thinking. He said he crawled to a wall with a window and banged on the glass with his fists before kicking through it. Feeling ready to faint, he said, he stuck his head outside for some clean air.

"Then, when I got my air, I saw I couldn't turn around and go back because I couldn't see nothing. Couldn't breathe, couldn't see nothing," Smith said. "I didn't know smoke would get that black."

He saw flames spreading along the walls, he said. He thought there was nothing he could do. He jumped out the window.

He said he doubts this decision, in hindsight, thinking he might have been able to drop some of his children down to the ground. But given the intense pain he felt upon landing, he wonders how badly the fall would have hurt his kids.

He had an idea to go upstairs and help the children out of a window that leads to a roof over the front porch. The flames and smoke stopped him, he said.

He flagged down a few strangers from passing cars, who helped him open the front door and kick in a front window, he says. The flames and smoked pushed them back.

"When you're in a situation like that, it's easy to be on the outside and say, 'Well, a person could do this,'" Smith said. "But it's hard to say what you could do when you're right in the middle of it and everything is coming at you all at once."

Smith said the fire rapidly swallowed his home. Arriving around 6:30 p.m., members of the South Bend Fire Department pulled six victims from the torched home and extinguished the flames. The five youngest children were pronounced dead that night. Angel, the oldest, died five days later in an Indianapolis hospital as her father sat by her side.

The Indiana Fire Marshal's Office, the agency overseeing the investigation into the fire, said investigators have so far found "no indication of foul play" in the cause of the deadly blaze. The fire's cause and origin remain under investigation, a spokesman said last week, and there are no updates to share.

Investigators are aware of prior electrical issues at the home, which were first reported by The Tribune, but have not determined whether the landlord had resolved those problems.

More: South Bend home in fire that killed 6 had recently failed federal safety inspection

The home on LaPorte Avenue failed a federally mandated safety inspection in July after an inspector found a list of 10 violations, including an "electrical problem throughout the entire home" and some defective and "burnt" electrical outlets, according to a report The Tribune obtained through a public records request.

The Housing Authority of South Bend had paid for a previous tenant to rent the LaPorte Avenue home, but removed that tenant after the property manager failed to remediate the safety violations, according to the public housing agency's director, Marsha Parham-Green.

South Bend-based WJM Property Management, the home's landlord, told The Tribune it had made all the necessary repairs to the house before Smith and his children moved in. But Smith says he experienced some electrical issues there. He said it seemed like only two outlets worked.

Because WJM Property Management stopped accepting federal housing vouchers after the failed inspection, it never had to prove to an inspector that the problems were solved.

With future hopes for his kids shattered, father tries to move forward

As they prepared to move from Iowa last year, the single father kept promising the children a better life in South Bend.

They would get to know his oldest daughter, whose cramped rental home he lived at with three of the kids for some time after the move, while the others lived with another family member. In October, Smith and the six children moved into the house on LaPorte Avenue.

The kids could play with cousins they'd never met. They would have to endure a winter in the shadow of Lake Michigan, their father told them, but by summer they could enjoy its beaches. Smith, a Benton Harbor native who said he left in his early 20s, knew the pattern well.

"All they would talk about is, 'Dad, now we can go do this, we can go do that! We got more places to go to!'" Smith said with a chuckle. "I said, 'But that don't mean you got more money to spend at those places. We still got to budget ourselves.'"

More: Catch up with all The Tribune's coverage of the LaPorte Avenue house fire that killed six

He said the six children all have the same mother, but she still lives in Iowa. He hasn't spoken to her since around the time Faith was born. She ceded full custody of the kids to Smith, he says.

Money was easier to come by in his work as a subcontractor in Iowa, he said. He would have to hire babysitters to watch after them on long days, but the work kept their stomachs full and paid for all the toys the kids wanted.

"The head of the house got to do what they got to do to make sure their family survives, you know," Smith said. "And that was my goal. I wanted to see them grow up and give me some grandkids, too."

"I want to know, the next 100 years from now," he added, "I got somebody that's part of me running around on God's Earth. He put us here to prosper."

But Smith isn't prospering, he said, despite what others post about him on social media. He mentions a photo of him someone shared on Facebook last month without his knowledge. Scores of commenters criticized Smith for going out to a local diner in an outfit that looked new, according to The Tribune's review of the post.

"How is that living it up?" Smith asked. "I'm not supposed to eat?"

Smith told The Tribune he's living with his eldest daughter again while he looks for a new apartment. He does some gigs for local subcontractors, he said, but has yet to find a stable job after spending his savings following the move from Iowa.

While more than $19,000 raised in a private GoFundMe bought him a truck after his was destroyed by the fire, he laments how he can't directly access or control the use of an unknown sum of money in the Smith Family Memorial Fund.

Lynn Coleman, the fund's spokesman, told The Tribune that he won't turn over the coffers to Smith or tell him how much is in the fund because he feels it would be irresponsible to the fund's donors.

Instead, Smith must submit invoices and receipts for expenses that Coleman and an anonymous committee of fund managers — even Smith does not know who's authorizing the payments — deem legitimate.

"You talk to Lynn and them, and they tell everybody, 'Just trust us. Just trust us,'" Smith said of the committee of strangers, none of whom he knew before his children died in January.

"We don't even know you," Smith said. "You don't got nothing to do with our family."

Smith visited the children's tombs on a recent afternoon after a burst of rainfall. If he had to survive the fire that killed them, he said, he was glad to spend time with them however he could.

But recalling the image of him and his six children hanging out in the bedroom, eating popcorn and candy, watching movies, the single father could hardly believe how abruptly and irreparably that scene had ruptured.

"All that got shattered," he said, and the grief carried him away for a moment, to a patch of grass near the mausoleum.

He stood alone there with his memories of his six children and wept.

Email South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on X: @jordantsmith09

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Father of six kids killed in South Bend house fire tells their story