Family loses home to fire with in-laws’ ashes inside
Fred Reed and his wife lost their home to the South Fork fire.
By Faith Egbuonu
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RUIDOSO, New Mexico (KOAT) — “My wife isn’t doing very well. We had some ashes of my wife’s parents in there, and she was really hoping we could recover those. I was just hoping that there’d be more of something. That it wouldn’t just be all ashes,” Fred Reed told KOAT.
“I thought there might be more that we could salvage out of it. Some of the interior stuff, but it doesn’t look like there’s much of anything that we can get out of it. It was just all the stuff in it. All the contents. We had pictures on the wall,” Reed said.
Reed told KOAT he and his wife had packed three days’ worth of belongings before bolting out the door. They were unaware of how close the fire was toward their home before they received the news from neighbors.
“There’s a hill right there. So, we really didn’t see how close it was to us. And then the people in that one house down there came up and said, ‘Hey, a friend said we need to evacuate. It’s coming this way.’ And, then the firemen came around in a car with a bullhorn saying, ‘Get out,’ Reed said.
“We got two dogs, and we grabbed about three days’ worth of clothes— thinking we’d be gone for a few days and come back. And we got out. We had to go north because 70, that highway to Alamogordo, was closed. By the time we got to Carrizozo, our neighbor over here had a ring doorbell on his door, and he was watching it. By the time we got up there, he called me and said, ‘I don’t think we have any houses anymore. My whole front yard is on fire,” Reed told KOAT.
Despite the damage and pain left behind, Reed told KOAT, he and his family are leaning on each other to pull through tough times. He plans to head to Alamogordo, New Mexico with family to start life again.
“We’re just trying to make a plan. I think we may end up in an RV, going somewhere, and rebuilding in some other city. My wife, I don’t think she’s at all ready to come. She said she may never come back up. I don’t think we’re going to rebuild here [Ruidoso] at all,” Reed said.
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