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Friday, Nov. 20, 2009

Macon boy burned in house fire returns home

The little boy’s sisters died in the fire. Their snapshots were atop the funeral-home stand next to the guest register in their great-grandparents’ living room, where everyone inside sat waiting for the survivor: the little boy.

“This will kind of build the family up a little bit after all the sadness,” the boy’s great-granddaddy said.

Then an hour or so later, Thursday at dusk, three days after a firefighter saved him from flames and smoke, 7-year-old Ricardo Barron Jr. came home.

And for a moment, his family felt good. He was alive.

Ricardo, who’d been life-flighted to an Augusta hospital early Monday after a 2 a.m. blaze killed his sisters — Mekala, 4, and Zanesia, 12 — wandered across his great-grandparents’ frontyard and into their arms after a car ride home in a minivan with “get well” balloons inside.

“How you doing?” his great-grandma Elizabeth Chatman said, leaning over for a hug.

“Hey, Junebuggy!” his great-grandpa Jesse Chatman Sr. said.

“Thank God he’s here,” his mother’s cousin, Phyllis Brisby, said. “Thank God. I’ve been praying for him to come home.”

Though Ricardo had been said to be in critical condition at the burn hospital earlier this week, a family member said Ricardo was still on the mend from the smoke that he breathed in.

Before Ricardo stepped inside the house, someone hid the photos of his dead sisters. They didn’t want him crying. His mother, though, whispered that he already knew the girls were gone.

The good news was that he wasn’t.

After Ricardo headed in to say hello to a dozen or so relatives and friends, Jesse Chatman said, “This makes me feel real good. Especially to see him walking.”

Last Sunday, Jesse Chatman had watched his little Junebuggy’s big sister, Zanesia, playing a TV video game with drums and a guitar there at his place on Edwards Avenue, just east of Henderson Stadium on the southern fringe of Unionville.

“She said she wanted to come back and play sometime,” said Chatman, 72, his voice trailing off. “But ... that was the last of it.”

Thursday evening, Ricardo, in a white polo and jeans, was walking around with his shoes off. He’d been in the car for more than two hours on the trip from Augusta and had slipped off his high-top sneakers. Someone asked if he was chilly. He shook his head no.

“You’re a real man there, a real man, if you ain’t even cold,” his mother’s cousin Brisby said.

In the frontyard, Ricardo’s parent’s embraced.

A few minutes later, back in the kitchen, Ricardo and his little cousin, who was about the same age, stood at a table flipping through a school book.

“You all right?” he asked Ricardo. “You must have cried a lot. ... I know you miss your sisters.”

Ricardo didn’t say anything. He headed out the back door to play.

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397.