‘I’ve lost everything … everything,’ says house fire victim Verna Campbell

The predawn fire in a downtown Riverhead home Jan. 7 started when a box fell onto the kitchen stove, where the owner of the home, Verna Campbell, was heating a kettle for breakfast tea. The box went up in flames and the flames spread rapidly throughout the first floor, Campbell said. (See story, Downtown Riverhead home destroyed in predawn fire.)

“I woke up to her screams,” said her daughter, Bonnie Sue Luce, who was sleeping upstairs.

“She was coming up the stairs screaming, ‘The house is on fire! The house is on fire!’ and I looked in the hall and all I saw was fire and smoke behind her,” Luce said.

“I told her we had to get out.”

Luce said she got her dog out of the house but couldn’t find her two cats or her mother’s cat.

“I couldn’t see a thing,” Luce said.

Campbell, Luce and another occupant of the house, escaped unharmed but the three cats perished.

Campbell, 78, was taken to Peconic Bay Medical Center for observation. She was released a short time later and returned to her home to search for her cat and assess the damage.

“I’ve lost everything… everything,” said Campbell, wearing only a nightgown and wrapped in a blanket, as she picked through the rubble of her possessions this morning.

Despite being told by her daughter that all three cats had died in the fire, Campbell persisted in searching for her cat amidst the debris.

In battling the blaze, firefighters broke windows throughout the home on both floors and vented the roof in two places to alleviate the heavy smoke conditions.

The interior of the home, built in 1860, was filled with more than one lifetime’s worth of possessions. Campbell has lived there her entire life — “All but two or three years of my life,” she said. “I inherited it from my mother,” she said.

Campbell, a lifelong Riverhead resident, has been the switchboard operator at Riverhead Town Hall since 1977.

RiverheadLOCAL photos by Peter Blasl
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