The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  Elaine Griffin’s family life unraveled after the fire as well. Four years before the explosion, she started to work at Imperial. Some of her co-workers envied her. She had married the love of her life, Albert. He often came by the factory with greeting cards and flowers and they would walk to the parking lot holding hands.

  Griffin escaped from the deadly smoke out the front door with singed lungs and burns on her legs and arms. When she went to sleep sometimes, she had nightmares about returning to the plant. “In [one] dream,” she said, “I went back to work. I could visualize what it would be like. Those footprints on the door.”91 The first few months after the fire were hard on her and her family financially. Without work, they worried about paying their bills and buying Christmas presents for the kids.

  Like most of her co-workers, Griffin hired a lawyer. Eventually, she got a settlement check of $30,638.48—not as big as some, but that was, in part, because she didn’t suffer from extensive or debilitating injuries, according to medical and court records. She got some more money from the second settlement.

  Sometime between the fire and that second settlement, Albert started to smoke crack, and he couldn’t stop. Arguments between Elaine and Albert, as reporter Wil Haygood heard from Griffin’s friends and neighbors, “kept erupting . . . over money.”

  “If she got $100, he didn’t want $50,” Elaine’s onetime co-worker Annette Zimmerman recalled, “he wanted the whole $100.”92

  By 1997, according to some who knew her, Elaine was fed up. She had cut Albert off from her bank accounts and her worker’s compensation checks. She may have even taken up with another man. He lashed out. In April of that year, police came to the couple’s trailer and arrested Albert for assault to inflict serious harm. A little more than a year later, on May 27, 1998, Police Captain Jay Childers returned to the trailer at 2:40 in the morning. He found Elaine slumped over the couch with blood coming out of a hole in her head. The couple’s grade-school son told investigators that his parents had been fighting. A Jennings Model 32-caliber automatic pistol and a few spent shell casings lay on the floor. At first, Albert insisted that his wife had killed herself. More than a year later, he waived his right to a trial and pled guilty to second-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to 191 months in prison with 426 days credit for time spent in custody.93

  The trauma of the fire didn’t end for Philip Dawkins Jr. the day of the fire, that day when someone handed the volunteer fireman his father’s lifeless body.

  Before the fire, Philip Jr. liked to ride off-road vehicles through muddy trails and along the backroads of Richmond County. But afterward, he became, according to a friend, withdrawn and quiet, and rarely left his house.94

  In April 1995, Philip Jr.’s wife, Wendy, by then lost in a haze of crack, went missing. Her husband joined the search for her until her bruised and beaten body, wrapped in a trash bag and blanket, was found floating in Blewett Falls Lake, a reservoir known for bass fishing a short distance from Hamlet. Somehow, the circular weights and anchor attached to her didn’t keep her at the bottom of the water. It turned out that Philip had killed her. According to the evidence, he had shot her in the back of the head at the home they shared together with their infant son before loading her into a boat and dumping her into the water.95

  Not every story, of course, ended in gun blasts, bloodshed, and addiction, though far too many did. And far too many fire victims and survivors, for far too long, continued to feel a mixture of dismay and distrust.

  For weeks after the fire, Georgia Quick lay in a hospital bed at Duke University. Estranged from her husband, far from her daughter, and unable to talk because of her injuries, she felt alone and isolated. The nurses on her floor became the most constant and warming presence in her life. They took care of her wounds and brought her food. Even more, they inspired her. A few years after getting out of the hospital, she went back to school and became a certified nurse’s aide.

  Quick couldn’t have moved into her new, cleaner, and steadier career without the help of her lawyer, Woody Gunter—“He went out of his way for me,” Quick noted—and without the help of Dr. Stephen Frye. Forty-six at the time of the fire, the Charlotte-based psychologist had spent years working with Vietnam veterans and teaching them how to cope with sudden flashbacks, pressing anxieties, and other PTSD symptoms. Representatives for Liberty Mutual Insurance, Imperial’s worker’s compensation carrier, contacted Frye while Quick was still in the hospital after they realized that the survivors’ psychological injuries were as bad as, if not worse than, their physical ailments. He made his first trip to Hamlet in October 1991 and met twelve rattled women and men in a room with folding chairs in City Hall. After that meeting and a few others, “people would come up to me privately, almost in a fearful way,” Frye recounted, “and ask if I could come back and see them individually. I thought it was wonderful that they could ask.” Over the next eight years, Frye estimated that he made the same seventy mile drive from Charlotte to Hamlet more than seven hundred times, eventually offering counseling to thirty-five victims of the Imperial fire, including Georgia Quick, in group and individual sessions.96

  “When I started to see Dr. Frye,” Quick recalled years after the fire, “that’s when I started to feel better.”

  The same was true for Lillie Bell Davis. Within weeks of the fire, she began working with Dr. Frye. He helped her understand that she wasn’t alone and that she needed to explore her pain, grief, and loss in order to reclaim her life. Frye was still going back and forth from Charlotte to Hamlet when Davis got a settlement check for $60,000. In Richmond County’s anemic real estate market, that was more than enough, as she wrote in her self-published memoir—the writing was itself part of her therapy—“to buy the home we always dreamed of.” She and her husband moved from the place where they raised their children to a place where they “could have something better” and where her new piano, another part of her therapy, “would fit real nice.”

  Moving out of town might have been, in part, what saved Davis and allowed her to launch what she called “a new beginning.”97

  As the one-year anniversary of the fire approached, Ruth DeRosa wrapped up her field research. The weekend trips to the Rockingham motel and the raised eyebrows from the front desk ended. As she packed up her interview notes, she knew that some fire survivors still suffered from PTSD symptoms. A major contributing factor, she determined, was the charred and mangled Imperial building. It was still there, looking almost exactly like it did the morning of the blaze. Marks from the investigation still remained spray-painted on the doors. Crumpled plastic trays used to package chicken products rested in random piles on the sides of the building. When it rained, some said, they could still get a whiff of fried tenders lingering in the air.

  Stephen Frye and other psychologists who worked with Imperial survivors also saw the plant as a trigger.98 When their patients went by the site, their breathing picked up, their hearts started to pound, their muscles tensed, their eyes teared, and they broke out into a cold sweat. But to Ruth DeRosa, the burnt factory shell surrounded by patches of weeds and piles of broken glass was more than just a trigger—it was a “form of terror.”99

  Like most Hamlet residents, the town’s mayor, Abbie Covington, wanted the plant torn down. “It reminds me of a tomb,” she said. But she didn’t necessarily want to turn the site into a memorial—not at first, at least—as some of the survivors and their supporters insisted on doing. Concerned about the lack of jobs and tax revenues in town, she, a few city council members, and a number of businesspeople hoped to get another factory onto the prime industrial spot with its easily accessible railroad spur. Still, whenever Covington could she avoided the plant, what she called the “the ever present reminder” of the Imperial tragedy, by driving the other way or taking the long way home, if she had to, rather than turn down Bridges Street.100

  Yet African Americans, especially working-class African Americans, couldn’t so easily avoid the wreckage. They couldn’t ju
st walk the other way or go down another street. The Imperial plant stood squarely on the black side of Hamlet’s persistent residential racial divide. One month after the fire, two months after the fire, a year after the fire, the plant was still there. If Dobbins Heights’ Johnny Reddick or Rockingham’s Elaine Griffin or Hamlet’s Annette Zimmerman wanted to go to Saint Peter United Methodist or the Prayer and Faith Temple Church of God in Christ, or to the City Limits nightclub or to the Buttercup Park with their kids, they had to pass the factory’s burned-out remains. When they drove to see friends who lived in the Leroy Hubbard Homes housing project, they could see through the broken windows into the plant. When the leaves had fallen, they could see the plant from Main Street. Coming the other way, they could still see the loading dock where the truck was parked the morning of the fire as well as the door that had trapped Loretta Goodwin inside. If they looked hard enough, they could even still see the boot prints left by maintenance man Bobby Quick when he kicked down the breakroom door on the morning of September 3, 1991.101

  Bobby Quick’s strong legs helped to save Gloria “Tootsie” Malachi’s life. A year later, though, Malachi’s back still throbbed, and she still suffered from chronic headaches. The physical ailments were easier to deal with than the mental anguish, the paralyzing fears and never-ending anxiety. From the front windows of her house, just a few doors down from the plant, she could see, first thing every morning and last thing every night, the building’s burnt and twisted remains. “I get scared when I go by the plant,” she told a reporter. “This affects my mind. Sometimes, I feel like I don’t have a future.”102

  With Malachi and her neighbors in mind, Hamlet’s African American leaders started to press city officials to get rid of the mangled structure. Determining the building’s precise legal status presented some tough legal challenges, especially when no one on the all-white city council or in the city manager’s office was eager to pay for lawyers’ fees out of the city’s already tight budget for something that wouldn’t generate additional revenues. At least, that’s what the people living near the factory came to believe. “There were accusations about the city regime,” recalled Reverend Miller, “about their indifference.” Inaction on the building, coupled with talk that won’t die down about the “fire house incident,” as locals referred to keeping the Dobbins Heights Fire Department on standby on September 3, 1991, created a perception that the city’s white political leadership put money ahead of people, especially black people. This, in turn, Miller observed, stirred up more distrust and “fueled a growing racial divide.”103

  A few years after the fire, the city ordered Imperial Foods to clear the site, but neither Emmett Roe nor Brad Roe responded. They were trying to put Hamlet behind them. Emmett Roe was embroiled in his own legal battles, and Brad Roe was trying to patch together a new life. Not long after the fire, he got married and moved to Charlotte and then to Atlanta. In both places, he worked as a bartender. Complicating matters, Imperial Food Products was locked in bankruptcy proceedings. Even if the town had the money and wanted to tear down the plant, local officials couldn’t do so without a judge’s approval or a clear deed to the property. Hamlet didn’t have either of these things, though it didn’t seem to some like town leaders pursued either of these avenues very aggressively. Several lawyers for the victims and their families didn’t want the building gone. They still needed it to construct their cases. The building made up part of the physical evidence.104

  So the plant stayed there past the second anniversary of the fire. It was there when the first lawsuits were filed. It was there when Joe Cheshire went to see Carroll Lowder. It was still there when the first settlement checks arrived, and it was there when Emmett Roe went to prison and when he got out. It was there when Elaine Griffin was shot dead and Wendy Dawkins’s limp body was plunged into a lake. It was there when Lillie Bell Davis moved out of town.

  Allen Mask Sr. had once served as the principal of the Monroe Avenue Elementary School. Like most well-educated African Americans in the area, he didn’t live in Dobbins Heights or in South Hamlet near the plant and the projects. But he still felt the burnt and kudzu-draped building’s presence in his community. In 1998, he wrote to Jim Hunt, who was at the time beginning his second stint in the governor’s office, about the fire and the state of his hometown. That tragedy, he told the state’s Democratic chief executive, has left “an indelible scar on the members of this community.” But would you believe, he asked him, that seven years after the fire, “the carcass of that tragic building still stands in its ruins . . . as a reminder of this tragic loss still to this day?”105

  Reverend Tommy Legrand joined forces with Mask to get the building torn down and removed. Years before the fire, he had been living and working in Philadelphia. One day, as Legrand explained it, he had a vision. The Lord called him to rural North Carolina. Within weeks, he stood on the back of a pickup truck, preaching the gospel to anyone who would listen in Dobbins Heights and the African American sections of Hamlet. He kept at it, and his following grew. Eventually, he secured a small patch of land at the corner of Thomas Street and Buttercup Avenue in South Hamlet and founded the Prayer and Faith Temple Church of God in Christ. In the early days, the congregation met in a simple structure with wood benches and no running water or electricity. Over time, Legrand built, largely with his own hands, a plain, low-slung brick sanctuary and then a food pantry, both of which stood across the street from the swings and basketball court at Buttercup Park, a stone’s throw away from the Hubbard housing project and the Imperial factory site.106

  By the 1980s, Legrand had extended his ministry out into the community. He belonged to a local group pushing for better schools and the recognition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a local and state holiday. Some called him a “hot head,” others a “rabble rouser,” but Legrand felt like he couldn’t attend to his mostly poor and working class congregation’s spiritual needs without dealing with the cloud of “hopelessness” he saw hanging over the area around his church.107

  “My aim,” Legrand declared, “was to upgrade the community, to instill hope.”

  “The building was an ugly site,” he remarked. “It stole hope.”

  A year after Mask wrote to Governor Hunt about the building, eight years after the fire, Legrand addressed Hamlet’s city council. By this time, the Hamlet preacher and doctor, representing the two sides of the economic divide in the town’s black community, were working together. With Mask in attendance, Legrand told the elected officials that the abandoned Imperial site served as “a constant reminder of the tragedy.” Healing could only come to the community around his church when the industrial ruins were cleared away and replaced by a memorial, not developed for future commercial use, as several council members were urging.108

  “It is our feeling,” Mask explained in a letter to Jesse Jackson in 1999, “that if it [Imperial] had been in another neighborhood, by now, some means would have been found to get rid of this building, and build a park, [or] center or something positive could have come from this tragedy.”109

  “It’s given us a black eye,” Hamlet City Manager Lee Matthews admitted in 2000 about the fire and the factory shell still standing. Yet, again and again, the city and the state balked at doing anything. There were liens, judgments, and budgets to worry about, they said, and not disingenuously, but African American residents remained convinced that what was lacking was the will and concern for fire victims and the people of color living around the building.

  State Senator Wayne Goodwin heard Mask and Legrand. The white Democrat from Hamlet asked for help from his colleagues in the General Assembly to clear the Imperial site. He told them that “many of the survivors lived within 100 yards of the structure” and that it had a “psychological effect” on them. Few of his fellow lawmakers, though, jumped at the chance to pitch in. Some questioned if this was, in fact, the state’s responsibility. Others threw up their hands and said that there wasn’t enough money in an already tig
ht budget for tearing down and removing the wreckage of burnt factories. Rebuffed at first, Goodwin kept pushing in Raleigh.110

  Reverend Legrand kept battling away in Hamlet as well. Around the time of his city council appearance in 1998, the South Hamlet religious leader struck up a relationship with his congressional representative, Robin Hayes, a first-term Republican from Concord. Not many from Hayes’s party got elected in these parts of North Carolina, not even in the era of Ronald Reagan, and especially not in Richmond County where Sheriff Raymond Goodman, a staunch Democrat, kept things under tight control even after he stepped down from power in 1994. Desperate to see the Imperial building gone, Legrand vowed to work with anyone who would listen, and Hayes, an economic and social conservative, heard him. He heard him when he told him how hard it was for local residents to drive by the plant on their way to the grocery store or gas station or a Little League game. When Hayes had a chance, he cornered the House majority whip, Tom DeLay, and majority leader, Dick Armey. He told them about the burned-out factory and how it brought “back a flood of bad memories every time someone looks out their front door.” Trying to help their colleague from a majority Democratic district, the Republican house leaders approved a $50,000 grant to the city of Hamlet to get rid of the building as part of a $11.3 billion federal relief package to deal with damages stemming from Hurricane Hugo.111

  By this point, almost ten years after the fire, the factory site was in a treacherous state. Torn pieces of paper and shards of glass littered the ground. Beams poked out. Walls listed to the right and left. Neighborhood kids climbed through holes in the perimeter fence to explore the wreckage. Teenagers hid behind the vacant site, smoking joints and drinking cans of beer and bottles of vodka. Locals feared another round of tragedy caused by neglect. What if the structurally compromised building collapsed on a kid? What if a piece of glass ripped through someone’s shirt or shoe? Rumor had it that there were barrels of toxic chemicals and noxious liquids buried in the rumble. What if a young boy or girl swallowed something poisonous? What about all that asbestos supposedly in the plant?