Official: Confession given in fatal fire

A woman and four children died in the fire Sunday.

GREENVILLE, Ohio (AP) — A confession shows that a house fire that killed a woman and four children was deliberately set, authorities said Thursday.

“We were able to determine through the investigation as well as through our interviews with witnesses that the fire was intentionally set,” said Shane Cartmill, spokesman for the state fire marshal’s office. “We have actually obtained a confession.”

The confession indicated the fire was set, but the person who set it did not intend to kill anyone, Greenville Police Chief Dennis Butts said in a statement. The name of the person confessing was not immediately released.

The blaze roared through the two-story wood-frame duplex Sunday morning.

Killed were Chanan Palmer, 31, and her daughter Kaysha Minnich, 8; and JeShawn Davis, 5, Jasmine Davis, 3, and Kayla Winans, 6, who were the children of Christy Winans, 31, who escaped the fire.

Doug Minnich, Palmer’s father, began sobbing when he heard the news.

“They take my daughter; they take my granddaughter,” he said. “She never ever done nothing wrong.”

Reached at her father’s house, Winans said she couldn’t talk and hung up.

Details to be released

Butts would not identify the person who confessed, whether the person was male or female, an adult or a child, or whether anyone had been taken into custody. He declined to answer further questions, but said more information would be released today.

Cartmill would not say how the fire was set. He said samples of material from inside the house were taken to a forensic lab and analyzed.

He said there was no indication that there were smoke detectors inside the home.

Winans, 31, told the Dayton Daily News in an interview Wednesday that she and her 6-year-old daughter, Kayla Winans, jumped from a second-floor window during Sunday’s blaze at the two-story frame duplex in this western Ohio city.

“She was jumping out, and she was on fire,” Winans said of her daughter.

On the ground, Winans screamed to firefighters: “There’s two more up there. There’s two more up there.”

Winans broke her left elbow and dislocated two toes on her left foot in the fall.

Winans moved into the duplex after Palmer’s husband died in July. Before that, she and her three children were living in a homeless shelter.

Winans said a loud pop awakened her and her boyfriend about 9 a.m. Sunday. She said she heard Palmer cry out, “Christy, there’s a fire. Get all the kids out.”

Greenville is about 30 miles northwest of Dayton.