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Fire survivor wanted to die, now she’s ... Living to help others
By JoAnn Jones
Audrea Heard knows the feelings of despair and hopelessness. She knows how it feels to want to die.
That’s why she has written a book to help others.
“I didn’t want to live,” said Heard, a former Youngstown resident who now lives near Atlanta. “If someone had killed me, I wouldn’t have cared.”
Heard, a 1993 graduate of East High School, lost everything Sept. 7, 1998 — her young son, her grandmother, all her belongings — in a tragic fire. On top of all that, many friends and relatives thought she could have saved those two lives.
“A lot of people in my family were mad, pointing fingers at me,” she said. “Yet I was dealing with my own guilt because I didn’t save them.”
Heard recalls that night very vividly.
“My grandma slept in the living room,” she said. “She yelled that she could see fire, and she kept yelling at me to put it out. I had called 911, and I remember thinking, ‘They should be here.’”
“I couldn’t put it out,” she continued. “It just spread. My mind just kept saying, ‘Put out the fire!’”
Heard said she ran outside and yelled for help. No one would let her go back in.
Her 20-month-old son, R.J., and her 83-year-old grandmother, Johnnie Mae Heard, perished that night.
“My whole world was based on taking care of what they needed,” she said. “From the time I got up to the time I went to bed, I took care of them.”
As the pain from the tragedy engulfed her, Heard said she went into a deep depression, although she didn’t realize it at first.
“When I was grieving, everything I did was very mechanical at first,” she said. “Going to church, helping people there, serving dinners … I was still doing all these things but going home depressed.”
“I stayed in the [Youngstown] area for four years, and I was still depressed,” she added. “I couldn’t even talk about it without crying.”
When Heard took a trip to Jacksonville, Fla., to visit a cousin who had gotten a job there, she realized that she “needed a new start” and went there to live. She stayed there for eight years before moving to McDonough, Ga., near Atlanta, where she lives now.
“That’s when I began my relationship with the Lord and started reading the Bible,” Heard said. “I was supposed to die that night, but I didn’t. Part of my purpose now is to help others.”
Heard’s book, “Thru the Fire,” which tells of her journey from the horror and hopelessness of that night to her spiritual walk with the Lord, is meant to do just that.
“The Lord was a provider for me when I needed him most,” she said, adding that counseling was also part of her healing. “I had to accept the fact that I couldn’t have saved them both. I did what was best at the moment — get help.”
“Losing someone like that — it’s a pain you can’t even describe,” she said.
“My focus is to help someone else deal with their depression or guilt,” Heard said. “People don’t know where help is.”
“Another thing I’d like to do is form a support group to help others through their loss,” she added. “People need that outlet.”
“My book is meant to be true hope for people to know you can live again,” she said.
“Thru the Fire,” Heard said, is available at www.amazon.com.
Heard herself has gotten the opportunity to live again as she prepares for her marriage on Oct. 17 in Campbell to John L. Turner Sr. of Manhattan, also a former Youngstown resident.
“We had been friends for many years,” Heard said, “and we recently reconnected. Then our relationship took a major shift.”
“He said he’d always loved me, and I never really saw that,” she said. “But as time went on, I began to see him in a different way. Our birthdays are two days apart, we like all the same things … it didn’t take long for the story to unfold.”
Heard, who received her degree as a small-business specialist from Florida Community College at Jacksonville and owns Power to Wealth Enterprises, said she and her husband will return to the Atlanta area after the wedding here.
“I think my greatest hope for this book” she writes in the conclusion, “is that it is in the hands of a person who needs it the most … it is my prayer that my tests and trials were not in vain.”