By Kara Spak and Art Golab
The Chicago Sun-Times
CICERO, Ill. — The Cicero apartment where Allison Gist moved her family about two years ago offered a simple luxury — space.
A door in the kitchen led to a finished attic — a large, carpeted area with a skylight window.
“That to her felt like a step up from where she had been living before,” said Michelle Holmes, Gist’s sister-in-law. “She felt it was more space.”
There slept most of Allison Gist’s brood — Sallie Gist, 18; Sallie’s two children, Rayshawn Reed, 3, and newborn Byron Reed; Sally’s twin siblings, Elicia and Elijah Gist, nicknamed “Man,” 16; and often Sally’s boyfriend, Byron Reed, 20, friends and family members said.
Those six, plus family friend Tiera Davidson, 19, died Sunday morning after a fire swept through the building, 3034 South 48th Ct., collapsing the roof and destroying the back porch.
Cicero officials couldn’t definitively say Monday if the building or Gist’s three-bedroom unit was overcrowded or violated village code. There was only one exit in the attic.
Officials also couldn’t say where the fire started, and why. The investigation was hampered, in part, by the extent of the devastation, said Ron Opalecky, Cicero’s assistant fire marshal.
“This was a hot, hard fire for these guys to put out,” Opalecky said. “It will be very hard to determine [a cause]. Very hard.”
The bodies of one adult and four children and the charred remains of box springs were found in the attic bedroom. Two adult bodies were found on the first floor, but officials said they could have fallen from the third floor when the roof collapsed.
“They had to sift through everything to find the bodies,” said Ray Hanania, Cicero town spokesman.
Elijah Grays, the father of Sallie, Elicia and Elijah Jr., spent the night in the apartment because he planned to celebrate his birthday there Sunday.
Grays, 49 and nearly blind, woke up to a thumping sound coming from the bedroom above about 6 a.m. He opened the kitchen door — the sole passage to the attic bedroom — to tell his kids to quiet down.
Instead, “All we saw was a bunch of flames,” said Allison Gist.
“There was nothing I could do, I wish I could have went up there and saved them,” Gist said. “But I couldn’t get up there because the flames were too high. There was only one way out and that way was all blocked.”
Gist, who was trying to make funeral arrangements for her family, spoke to reporters Monday evening in the parking lot of a Cicero motel where the town relocated various families made homeless by the fire.
“Everybody’s just gone,” she said. “I wished I could go back and bring them back, but they’re never coming back.”
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