ALUMNI COLUMN :: "Covering the Fire"
By David Cho
I see much of God in journalism. Fundamentally, the job aims to shine the light of public attention in dark places, to root out corruption. Occasionally, however, I get a chance to use the pen to give attention to where it is due and to what glorifies God.
I met Dana Christmas about four months after the Fire. Her skin was still cracked and blistered; her face had more scars than good skin. Three of her fingers had burned and turned to stubs. Yet through her agony, the 21-year-old still flashed her white, toothy smile, the bright vestige of the attractive woman she once was.
"Who will marry her now?" one of her friends carelessly wondered aloud to me once.
The Fire broke out at a freshman dorm at Seton Hall University just after 4 a.m. on January 19 of 2000. With 11 other reporters, I was sent early in the morning to cover the chaos as it was unfolding. Investigators said it was arson, but so far the years of police work have revealed little. Arsonists are rarely convicted, they say, mainly because most of the evidence burns up in the fire.
That wintry morning, all three teenage witnesses to the crime perished in the flames, the victims of a revenge scheme allegedly concocted by a local gang. Fifty-eight other students were also seriously injured, including three who were burned almost beyond recognition. Christmas was one of them.
A senior, she was the counselor to the excitable freshmen on her floor. And she mothered them as her own cubs. They slept on her floor and ate up her morsels of advice. So when she was awoken by a fire alarm after 4 a.m. on January 19, her first thought was to shield her "babies" from harm. False and prank alarms were so frequent in the dorm that almost all the freshmen kept sleeping, ignoring the screaming siren.
Christmas, though, ran into the smoky hallway and began knocking on doors, yelling at students to get up. Three times she ran back into her room to grab a gulp of fresh air, and then would venture into the smoke again to wake her fellow students. Three times she had a chance to flee the building-she felt the back of her neck burning and her hair on fire. But Christmas chose to stay.
Finally, when she could do no more, she collapsed near a stairwell. She prayed, "Oh God, I did all I can do. I am ready to go home to be with You."
"And then all I know is I heard a male voice who told me to hold on and all I saw was white, his white shirt," said Christmas, her eyes closed as she remembered the moment. "If it wasn't God, it must have been a guardian angel."
Somehow, Christmas found herself outside the dorm on the lawn, barely conscious. She was so badly burned that paramedics at first left her for dead in the chaos of the recovery effort. She laid on the wet grass for about forty minutes before an ambulance worker noticed that she was still breathing. She was brought to a nearby hospital and slipped into a coma. Two weeks later, when she woke up, she looked at her scarred face and charred body for the first time. In that moment, with her marred image peering back at her in the mirror, Christmas remembered thinking, "What if I left them behind? I don't think I could have lived with myself."
Of the three most critically injured victims of the Seton Hall fire, Christmas was in the worst shape with over 60 percent of her body burned. Of the same three, she is the healthiest today and doctors say she could eventually resume the semblance of a normal life. More than 15 students have come forward and said that Christmas' efforts woke them up and saved their lives.
The man in white, who rescued Christmas from the flames, has never been identified.
"By this we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers." I John 3:16
David Cho covered the Seton Hall fire as a reporter for The Star Ledger and now writes for The Washington Post. The Ledger's coverage of the fire, including a series on the burn victims, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and circulated across the country. Since the fire, Christmas received some of the most prestigious heroism awards given to civilians and has attempted to finish her college degree.
