Couple who lost baby in fire had been trying to get pregnant for years

FILE PHOTO/Flag of Edmonton (Wikimedia Commons, Fair Use)

EDMONTON — The father of a baby who died in a house fire says he tried to go back into his burning house three times, but couldn’t get past the flames.

Cordell Brown said he was sleeping on the main floor of his southwest Edmonton home Tuesday morning when he woke to find his porch on fire.

Brown said his wife Angie was asleep on the second floor with their son, five-month-old Hunter.

He said he tried to fight the fire with the garden hose before crews arrived.

“The fire was so intense,” Brown said. “From the time that we noticed the fire, because it was very instant, the fire started in about two seconds and it engulfed the whole house.”

Brown and six others who lived in the home were able to escape on their own. Firefighters rescued Brown’s wife, Angie Tang, and their baby. Hunter died of his injuries and Tang is in hospital, where she remains under sedation.

He said doctors brought her out of sedation briefly, and he and other family members told her that Hunter had died.

“Took eight of us to hold her down, she didn’t take that very well and she was re-sedated,” Brown said.

“Doctors were saying there was pretty serious damage to her lungs and all of her airway, and there are burns from the smoke because she was in the fire for almost 20 minutes,” he said.

Brown said he and Tang had been trying to have a baby for about four years. He told Global News that his mother died of cancer last year and they used the inheritance money for fertility treatments.

“Hunter was a fertility baby, having Hunter was a $50,000 expense,” Brown said. “We loved him to the moon and back. He was our most prized possession. Our dogs are dead.”

Edmonton police say an autopsy done on the baby Wednesday determined he died of smoke inhalation. They say fire was deliberately set and have opened a homicide investigation.

Brown urged anyone with information to call police, and had a message for whoever was behind the blaze.

“Whoever started the fire, I don’t know if they did it as a prank or whatever, but it’s past a prank now, people, you almost killed six or seven people, you did kill one person.”