Mom: Son Hated Staying In House Family Was Warned Of Dangers Months Before Fatal Fire

The mother of a Spokane Valley boy severely injured in a shed fire Monday said he pestered her into letting him sleep in the unsafe metal structure.

“I guess I wasn’t very assertive,” Vicki Jo Summer said. “I don’t have control over him.”

Badly burned, 15-year-old Brent Connely now faces a six-month hospital stay, Summer and other family members said.

The boy is reported in serious condition at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he is going through skin-graft operations.

His friend, Jeffrey Himes, 11, was killed in the blaze at 502 S. Custer.

Firefighters said it was the second time in four months they extinguished a fire in the shed, which had been converted to a spare bedroom.

Portable heaters operating on a long extension cord from Summer’s house are blamed for both fires.

Acting on firefighters’ advice, Summer said she refused to let Brent sleep in the shed after the October fire. But he talked her into changing her mind. “He hated staying in the house,” Summer said. “He wanted more privacy.”

The former foster mom said she is angry over news accounts portraying her as an unfit parent.

It isn’t the first time she faced such criticism.

Summer and Brent’s father, Bill Connely, divorced in 1982, when Summer won custody of their son.

According to court documents, she lost custody seven years later, after Connely showed the court pictures of bruises on his son’s legs and buttocks.

Summer, who had two foster children at the time, drew praise from state social workers, who called the beating “an isolated incident that occurred while she was under a lot of stress.” Connely wrote that his exwife once left Brent, then 5, home alone with her baby. On another occasion, she forgot to pick Brent up at school, he wrote.

Connely also told the court that he feared his ex-wife’s inattentiveness would endanger their son, as happened to another of her children in 1978.

That 18-month-old boy drowned in his grandparents’ swimming pool while Summer was in the house, according to news accounts and Connely’s written statements.

The boy began sleeping in the shed because “there just wasn’t room” in the 624-square-foot house Summer shares with four of Brent’s stepbrothers and step-sisters.

As temperatures dipped below zero Sunday night, Summer said she told Brent to sleep in the house and avoid the shed. Once again, however, the boy persuaded her to relent.

Summer said Jeffrey Himes “was like a little brother” to Brent and visited often, typically staying in the shed. “He used to call me mom.”

Members of the Himes family said Tuesday Jeffrey was forbidden from visiting after the October fire.

He convinced his older sister to let him spend the night there Sunday, while his mother was out of town.

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