By Elisabeth Strillacci

A family of three is still thanking the heavens they all made it out alive after their home was completely destroyed by fire in the middle of the night May 25.

Lena Teodorovici and her fiance Jered McMeans were sleeping when their teenage daughter banged on their bedroom door about 1:30 a.m., screaming for them to get out of the house.

Teodorovici said she did wake up, but didn’t process why.

“When I opened my eyes, it was pitch black and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face,” she said. “The smoke was so hot and so thick and we barely made it to our door.” But they didn’t yet realize their daughter was already out of the house, having run to a neighbor’s home to call 911.

So McMeans grabbed something to cover his face and started back into the house to retrieve their daughter, while Teodorovici went to the same neighbor to call 911.

“My daughter answered the door,” she said. “We ran back two the house screaming at the top of our lungs for him to get out of the house, because at that point, it was fully in flames.” McMean said he barely heard the two women screaming and was halfway through the house, but he made his way back out.

“We all just hugged each other and cried,” Teodorovici said. “We all thought we were going to lose one another. It was tragic, but we thank God for watching over us.”

Their daughter had woken up to smoke and coughing and saw the walls of her room were on fire, and told her mother she covered her face, ran out to her parents’ door then went to call for help.

Fire officials told the family the fire appears to have started in the dryer or behind it, but Teodorovici said it was not running when they went to bed. Her daughter finished a load of laundry about 11 p.m.

The family has lived in the rental home near Hurley School for two years, and is now facing having to replace everything. Teodorovici and McMean have run a construction and handyman business and in addition to all of their personal belongings, all of their tools were lost, so they are starting over both personally and professionally.

And they have nowhere to live even temporarily, so they are spending nights in their vehicle in various truck stops, but Teodorovici says they are so grateful to be together they are coping.

“We need some kind of shelter, camper, short term place to live,” she said. “My poor fiancé has been trying to gather what melted construction equipment he can from the business to take to the scrap yard. Our business is at a complete standstill because all of the equipment was destroyed.”

The family didn’t really know the full extent of the damage until the sun came up Sunday morning and they could see that everything was burned.

“It makes sense because those flames were so hot, you could hear the heat and flames,” she said. “It was like a humming or vibrating sound.”

All three of them are traumatized both by the loss and by what could have happened.

“We are stressed to the max, and we cry at least five times a day when we stop to think of the reality of what happened to us and how it could’ve been different,” she said. “My fiancé told me he can’t shake the feeling of thinking our daughter was still in there and fully believing she was dead because her whole room was in flames. He didn’t care about himself, he was going to go in there and get her.

“Our daughter saved our lives,” she added. “If she hadn’t stopped to beat on our door and scream, we would not be alive, Our bedroom was fully in flames by the time the fire department arrived,”

She said firefighters worked incredibly hard to get the fire out, but she knows it burned fast and hot and it made it hard to save anything.

A family friend has started a GoFundMe for the family that you can find here or by searching on GoFundMe for the title “help Lena’s family rebuild after house fire.”

The fundraiser was started by Courtney Burton, who wrote, “The fire consumed their home and all of their belongings — clothing, furniture, cherished memories and the essentials we often take for granted. Lena and her family are now facing the unimaginable challenge of starting over with nothing.

“Right now, they need the basics — clothes, toiletries, food — and soon they’ll need help securing new housing, replacing vital documents, and rebuilding their lives from the ground up. Every dollar, every share, every message of support means the world right now.”

No matter what happens, Teodorovici said they are all so incredibly grateful to still have each other, and to all be safe and unharmed, and that is what they are holding on to at the end of the day.