Six students lost their home and many possessions to a fire,

but it wasn’t their fault

Anabelle Conley scrolled through TikTok just after 9 a.m. on Jan. 27. She was still sleepy after a late night out the day before and sat in bed, dressed in pajamas. An employee from her rental agency was downstairs trying to thaw out frozen water pipes. The house was quiet. Her other roommates were still asleep in their beds.

Conley, an IU senior, had let the worker into the house. Normally, she wouldn’t have been awake this early, but she said she’s glad she was. Otherwise, she says, she doesn’t know what would have happened next.

One of Conley’s roommates and IU senior, Jordan Lyman, remembers waking up that morning to a strange scent.

“Do you smell that?” she asked her boyfriend who was there at the time.

“Someone probably just burned toast or something,” she remembers him replying.

But Lyman said the smell kept getting stronger and stronger.

Still in her room, the smoke billowing in from the bathroom shifted Conley’s attention away from her phone. She said, at first, she couldn’t believe it was a fire but ran after the maintenance man just in case. She then started evacuating everyone else in the home.

She had run through the house shaking everyone awake as quickly as she could. She remembers how fast everything changed, and the disbelief that fell over the group on that morning in January in the 20 degrees Fahrenheit weather.

Less than five minutes after Conley first saw the smoke, her roommates were lined up in the street. Still in their pajamas, the group watched the fire spread through their home.

“We're all sobbing on the street, in slippers, crying and calling our parents,” Conley said.

The house the students had waited to live in was now covered in a cloud of gray smoke.

And they didn’t know why.

***

Now, more than a month later, the house sits empty. This was a home the residents planned to move into for years. They signed a lease back in 2019, in preparation to take over after a group from their sorority had left.

The marks of fire are long gone, and the residents have moved to a new location. In their new house, the students had been sharing beds with one another for some time after the fire to find a sense of safety.

As for how the fire started, the Bloomington Fire Department reported that the employee from Chickering Rentals, started the fire accidentally when using an air heater to thaw the frozen pipes. The residents say they are still trying to salvage some of what they had in the home and have only received roughly $600 in compensation from Chickering Rentals. However, since the tenants did not take out a renter’s insurance policy, their items were not protected — regardless of how the fire started.

Chickering Rentals said in an email that they could not currently comment on the situation due to ongoing discussions between insurance companies.

Conley said the fire came in addition to a number of issues they already had with the company.

“We just had small maintenance issues at first,” Conley said thinking about the first few months at the home.

It was a stopped shower one day, then a locked basement door the next. But the issues continued and finally reached a boiling point when the group filed a maintenance request to fix the heat in their home. When Chickering Rentals sent a worker to fix the issue, he said the residents’ furnace filter had been left unattended for so long, it could become a fire hazard.

After hearing this, roommate Jordan Lyman drafted an email to send to their rental company on Jan. 26. She explained this was just one of many issues the group dealt with in the house and did not want to see other tenants treated in a similar way.

“However, the maintenance man said the amount of filth was very concerning because it can lead to a fire hazard and dangerously poor quality of air,” the email read.

Later that day, Chickering Rentals property manager Lyndsi Thompson responded to the email with an apology, explaining that the house had two furnaces and their maintenance staff had forgotten the second. She assured the residents they would check all filters in May.

***

The call to 911 was at 9:36 a.m. the next morning.

Conley was pacing back and forth on her front porch as the smoke slowly seeped out of her home, as seen on the recording from her front door camera. She was still in her fuzzy slippers and robe in the cold January weather. One hand was clutching her phone, while the other was held over her mouth. She listens and nods, but there’s not much else she can do. Her roommate and IU senior Stella Garland, who she has known since high school, was talking to the maintenance man sent from Chickering.

“We’re getting everyone,” she says to him.

“Is anybody injured?” a dispatcher asks on the other line with the man, who is breathing heavily before he responds.

By 9:43 a.m., the first fire engine pulled up to the front of the house.

By the time the Bloomington Fire Department extinguished the remaining flames, the fire had already traveled quickly from the basement stairs and into the attic. The older design of the home was in part to blame for the speed of the fire that had been traveling inside the walls. The majority of the damage had been done not even an hour after the maintenance man knocked on the front door.

Conley and her five other roommates’ minds traveled immediately to what had been left in the house. Garland was thinking about the letters from her twin sister that were still in her room. Her roommates thought of the photos from their families. They have since recovered these items.

***