Kristy Goswick can’t sleep at night.

The memories of the fire are still with her. She said it’s easier to detect a fire when awake, so sometimes sleeping doesn’t feel safe. That’s what’s constantly on her mind now, after a fire destroyed her old apartment complex.

Goswick, freshman undecided major, lived in Quail Ridge apartments in Carthage with her three children and roommate, Jennifer Snowden, sophomore health promotion and wellness major.

On the night of Nov. 25, Goswick put her children to bed like normal, placing their backpacks and shoes by the door. She said it was funny, because on that particular night it was the first time the children questioned her as to why they had to put their shoes by the door.

“If there’s ever a fire or anything, we’ll know right where the shoes are,” Goswick told her children. “We can grab them and get out.”

After going to bed, she could hear the neighbors above her being rowdy and loud.

“It’s not unusual to hear this screaming and fighting and stuff that goes on,” Goswick said.

Around 11:30 p.m., she heard a woman yelling for help and thought it must be some sort of domestic dispute. She told Snowden to call 911, grabbed a weapon and ran outside.

When she turned the corner, she saw the smoke.

Goswick ran back into her apartment and yelled for Snowden to get the children out of bed because there was a fire.

Snowden said she tried to wake up the children, but it wasn’t until she walked outside to see where the fire was that she saw the urgency.

“I realized it was our building,” Snowden said.

After her children were out of the apartment, Goswick hurried around the rest of the complex banging on doors, waking people up and telling them to leave the building because of the fire.

Some of the adults from the apartment above Goswick’s had to jump from the building onto a blanket below. One woman sustained a back injury from landing wrong.

When the initial excitement was over, Goswick sat down in the parking lot and watched Quail Ridge burn and explode in orange and blue flames, her home taken from her.

What she had originally thought was another domestic dispute amongst her neighbors turned out to be a fire that engulfed her apartment complex in flames and left her homeless.

She said it was reported that a 3-year-old started the fire in the apartment above hers by playing with a lighter near some curtains. Goswick said she doesn’t know if she believes that, since she said her neighbors didn’t have curtains.

Snowden and Goswick were able to salvage many of their clothes and a few other belongings, but they said it all has smoke and water damage. Friends tell her she will never get the smoke smell out, but she brought them to the cleaners anyway, hoping they would be able to save the clothes.

Goswick, contacted Melissa Locher, coordinator of disability services in the Learning Center, shortly after the fire.

“Kristy was calling me saying, ‘I don’t know where we’re going,'” Locher said.

Locher sent out a campus-wide e-mail asking for donations to help the two students. They didn’t have renters insurance, so they lost a lot to the fire, including a place to live. The Red Cross gave Goswick and Snowden money for a hotel room through Dec. 1, after that they stayed at the Salvation Army for a couple nights and then at a friend’s house until they could find a place to live. A person who works at Missouri Southern offered the students an empty duplex.

Goswick said she was grateful for a place to live, and the owner is going to work with them on rental fees until they get back on their feet.

Locher said donations have been coming in consistently since she sent out the e-mail. The students have received cash, clothes, dishes, sheets, pillows and more.

“It’s been a really nice community effort,” Locher said.

Snowden is on Southern’s track team. Her teammates wanted to help out in some way, so they came out to the duplex on Dec. 5 to help Goswick and Snowden move in and clean.

“The donations have definitely been overwhelming,” Goswick said with tears in her eyes. “It really does make you feel like it is a family here.”

“It’s mind-boggling that people will go to such great extents when they don’t even know you.”

Now, Goswick is trying to get her life back to normal, but it isn’t easy. Her children are also having trouble sleeping, afraid another fire might catch them with their eyes closed. She said she’s had to go to their school, because she was told that her youngest, 10, wouldn’t stop crying.

The hardest thing Goswick said is trying to get things together so she can make sure her three children have a Christmas. That’s important to her. But, she said it’s most important that they made it out of the fire without harm.

“We’re alive,” she said. “It makes everything else look really small.”

If any person would like to donate items to Goswick and Snowden, please contact the Learning Center at 625-9373.