Out of the Ashes

They found other clues by a den window, the only one at the front of the house that wasn't encased in burglar bars: There was broken glass on the carpet, suggesting the window had been broken from the outside. The flames appeared to have vented through that same window, leaving heavy burn marks on the wall. When they found a charred and mostly empty gasoline can, the picture began to come into focus: The fire had been set intentionally. The burn patterns from the liquid were broken in patches; whatever liquid caused the spread of the fire had been dumped out in splashes. This wasn't a case in which a child had mistakenly kicked over a gas can and the liquid simply flowed out.

To this day, one bit of evidence--the love seat pushed against the front door, which may have prevented the Jordan children from escaping and hindered firefighters' attempts to rescue them--still doesn't make sense. Did the arsonists haul it there, blocking the most logical exit? Had Bernard pushed it there in an attempt to keep intruders out of the home?

Carlin also found a child's memento that made the tragedy hit home. "When I went into that bedroom where they were, one of my most vivid memories of any investigation I've ever done...was a picture taken out of a child's coloring book," she says. It was pinned to the wall next to the window. "It was a firefighter sliding down a pole. And one of the children had written on it, 'The firefighter is my friends.' And it just broke your heart to see that next to where they all died."

Carlin and Young called in police homicide detectives when they believed they had an arson case, and carpet and flooring samples they'd taken from the home showed up positive for gasoline soon afterward. They knew of no one, however, who'd seen intruders enter the home that night, much less set a fire. But the physical evidence seemed to indicate that the arsonists had set foot inside the home.

The investigators turned to Ketrick Jordan for information once his condition had stabilized. Today, he clearly remembers Bernard's state of agitation that night. Ketrick decided to go to bed in the girls' bedroom instead of his own because he was scared. He got up late at night for a glass of milk and found Bernard talking through the partly open front door to several men on the porch. Whatever they were saying, Bernard seemed upset by it. He quickly shooed his little brother back into bed.

No sooner had Ketrick gone to sleep, it seemed, than Bernard was waking up him and the girls, shouting that the house was on fire. Ketrick's big sister, Demetra, didn't believe it at first. But the smoke had begun to seep into the bedroom. Ketrick says he and Bernard ran down the hall into the living room, only to be driven back by flames. They tried to bust into their grandmother's room, but the door was locked.

All of the kids ended up back in Demetra's room. "It was just real hot and smoky and dark," Ketrick says. "Every breath you'd take was hot. You could hear a lot of screams and hollers. I told my little sister, 'Stick your head under the covers.' She tried that, and she said, 'Keke, it's too hot.'"

Demetra and Ketrick broke the bedroom window, trying to reach fresh air, but they couldn't go any farther than the padlocked burglar bars. Ketrick leaned on the windowsill and pressed his face against the bars. The smallest children had already passed out. "I went into a state of shock," Ketrick says, "and fell out right there."

While Ketrick says he remembers the fire "like yesterday," he couldn't offer much help to investigators in 1988. He never got a good look at the faces of the men on the porch and isn't certain how many were there. "It's hard to get a lot of information out of someone who's on morphine," Carlin says. "Frankly, I don't think Ketrick wanted to remember a lot about that night, and I can't blame him.

"I remember talking to him one time a couple months after the fire, and we were talking about his family. He said, 'I can't think of them all at one time. I can only think about Ericka right now. It hurts too much to let all of them in my heart at one time. Only Ericka's here now.' Ericka was the closest to him."

Within a few months of the fire, investigators were stuck with little more than a list of goofy street names. Some teenagers knew about the Jamaican presence in the neighborhood, that Bernard was selling drugs for them, but they were too scared to put their names on witness affidavits. By then, Carlin had found out enough about the ruthlessness of Dallas' Jamaican posses that she wasn't surprised. "You had someone go into a home and burn up children," she says. "They had to know those kids were in there. They didn't care. They had no respect for human life whatsoever, and they sent a very clear message: You mess with us, we get you back."