Fire destroys mobile home, kills three pets in Valley Center (+video)

It’s been a hard couple of years for Susan Jackson, and it just got a lot harder, said Joanne Thompson, the owner of the lot that Jackson’s mobile home had rested on until Monday.

A fire that started in Jackson’s kitchen destroyed the home in Valley Center, killed her three pets and sent her elderly mother to the hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation.

Firefighters did manage to rescue the urn holding her son’s ashes. Everything else, Jackson said, was destroyed.

A few years ago, Jackson’s son, Joseph Scott, had a heart attack and died in the front yard at age 31, Jackson said.

She had been raising her two grandchildren with her 83-year-old mother.

A neighbor, Roger Byers, was standing on the porch with his fiancee Monday when the fiancee first smelled smoke. Byers went to investigate and smelled burning chemicals from the particle board glue next door.

Jackson’s mother, Sally Wall, was waiting on the porch. She asked Byers whether he could go inside to rescue her pit bull, Pebbles, and two cats, Max and Garfield.

But Byers said the smoke was too intense. So he and his fiancee took Wall to wait in a van until the fire department arrived and took her to the hospital.

This was the second fire in the mobile home community since it opened in 1969, according to Thompson.

By Monday afternoon, Jackson was on her way to pick up her grandchildren, Dyson, 15, and Dayton, 12, from school. But she still didn’t know where they would be sleeping Monday night.

“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do yet. I really don’t.” She said she was planning to call the Red Cross for help.

Byers, who owns another mobile home in the same community, said he was willing to let Jackson and her family stay there once it was made ready.

“I wouldn’t know what to do (if it had happened to me), and I would want someone to help me,” Byers said.

This story was originally published January 25, 2016 at 6:27 PM with the headline "Fire destroys mobile home, kills three pets in Valley Center (+video)."