CHICAGO — A Christmas morning fire in the city’s Roseland neighborhood destroyed a garage and killed a man, but his body wasn’t found until Sunday after a fire official responded to pleas from a mother looking for her son.
Michelle Murry said that after days of searching and calls to officials, her son’s burned body was found in the fetal position in the rubble of the fire on the 9400 block of South LaSalle Street.
“I had called the fire department to ask them to help with some of the debris, because I felt my son was under the debris, and he was,” Murry told WGN on Monday.
Murry said her son, Wesley Freeman, was supposed to visit on Christmas but he neither showed up nor called. She learned about the fire the next from neighbors and said her calls to police and fire went nowhere.
“They told me no one was there. They put out the fire and no one was there,” she said.
In the days following Christmas, Murry called hospitals and filed a missing persons report, still with a strong sense that her son was in the garage where she said he’d been living for about six months.