HAMILTON, Ohio — Karen Freeman couldn’t see when she woke up in the hospital, but she could feel the deep wounds on her hands and stomach. The fire inside her home had burned hot and hungry. The barred windows and padlocked emergency exit, both installed by her landlord, nixed any chance of escape.
“It’s the worst fire death I’ve seen since I’ve been on,” one Hamilton officer told WCPO that day: June 7, 1988.
“From what I was told, they were getting ready to put me in a body bag,” Freeman said Wednesday night.
She was the only survivor. Her four children — 7-year-old Maryann Smith, 4-year-old Jennifer Miller and 2-year-old twins James and Wesley Miller — died alongside her boyfriend, 38-year-old Lee Cooper, and two neighbors. One was 18 years old. The other was 4.
The house itself was eventually demolished. Freeman said she hopes what stands there now — a playground and a memorial plaque bearing the victim’s names — would make her children smile.
The latter was the product of neighbors’ efforts to create a monument in honor of the fire’s seven victims. Pastor Barbara Cope, whose church Kelly’s House of Hope sits directly across from the site of the fire, began pushing for the monument after watching the playground replace the troubled home.
“I think the first day they put the monkey bars and stuff, I came home and I looked out my window, and there were about 15 kids on the monkey bars,” she said. “All I did was just stand up in my room up there and just weep."
She partnered with the Renew North End neighborhood group and other community advocates to commission and install the plaque.
That brought Freeman to tears of her own.
“It's one of the sweetest things anybody's ever done to remember my children by,” she said. “Took them a long time, but they finally got it done and it just... it means a lot to me."
