Survivor of NE Portland apartment fire that killed boyfriend, roommate fighting for her own life

PORTLAND – For the past month, Kelsi Edmonds has remained largely immobile with burns over 65% of her body, her eyes barely open, bandaged from head to toe while heavily sedated on a ventilator.

But 10 days ago, she tried to sit up and lift her legs. She nodded when asked a question.

“That was huge,” said her father, Brian Edmonds. “She’s still got to fight. That fight has to last for the rest of her life.”

The 26-year-old was one of several roommates trapped in a top-floor apartment at Heidi Manor in northeast Portland when fireworks are suspected to have ignited trash in a dumpster in the predawn hours of July Fourth.

The flames quickly melted the plastic dumpster tucked in the carport of the complex under two stories of apartments and raced through the 16-unit wood-framed building.

Kelsi jumped from the top level about 30 feet up. So did her boyfriend.

The two had been awakened just before 3:30 a.m. and crossed a center skywalk to the only staircase from their floor, but the stairwell was already engulfed in flames, witnesses and investigators said.

Another roommate didn’t jump and died. A fourth roommate got out unhurt after trying to wake up neighbors.

Kelsi’s parents haven’t told her yet that her boyfriend, Seth Robert Thompson, 31, died of his injuries.

For now, they have visited their only daughter nearly every day at the Oregon Burn Center at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center and kept vigil while she has undergone more than a dozen surgeries, with many more expected.

They’re unsure of what lies ahead for Kelsi, so they follow the lead of her surgeons and nurses, learning to treasure every small gain she makes.

“I stand beside her bed and hold her arm or hold her hand, of course all covered in bandages, and I talk to her, read to her and tell her I love her,” said her mother, Sondra Edmonds.

“I tell her everybody is praying for her.”

Flames overran escape route

Less than 10 hours before the deadly fire broke out, Kelsi Edmonds and Seth Thompson had been at her parents’ house in Battle Ground, Washington, laughing in the kitchen as they prepared pork carnitas together while listening to podcasts.

The young couple left about 8 p.m. to return to their apartment off Northeast Weidler Street between 22nd and 23rd avenues.

“I didn’t want them to go,” Sondra Edmonds recalled, cherishing the happy, carefree moments. “I almost said, ‘Just stay overnight.’ But Seth wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons with friends.”

The dumpster that caught fire at Heidi Manor sat below the west side building in the U-shaped complex, which included their apartment. The fire ravaged the east- and west-side buildings that are positioned parallel to each other above the carport and also damaged a rear, unattached building.

Roommate Jonathan Kinney, 32, was able to run out first. He was awakened by another roommate, Robert William Gremillion, 31.

By that time, their apartment was filling with smoke, Kinney told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Kinney grabbed his wallet, cellphone and glasses and threw on a shirt and sweatpants he plucked from atop his laundry basket. He rushed out of his bedroom and snagged his backpack by the front door.

The others also were up, trying to grab their belongings and get Kelsi’s two cats, Kinney said.

Kinney headed out the front door, across the skywalk and down a flight of stairs. He crossed a lower skywalk and another set of stairs to the parking lot.

He looked back as he was running and saw that his roommates were leaving the apartment – maybe about 10 to 20 seconds behind him, he estimated.

Someone on the ground tried to knock down the flames with a fire extinguisher with little success. Then Kinney said he heard someone yell that people were still on the top floor.

When he looked up, he said he saw his three roommates on the top skywalk knocking on the door of an apartment across from their unit.

By then, the flames had reached the lower staircase and skywalk and were advancing toward the three.

As the flames were “getting closer and closer to them, they had to make the decision whether to jump off the third-floor catwalk to the parking lot below or run through the flames,” Kinney said.

Kelsi jumped first, followed by Thompson, he said.

Gremillion lay on the upper skywalk and didn’t get back up. The structure collapsed and his body was found in the parking lot.

Injuries include broken back, leg, ankle

Sondra and Brian Edmonds got a phone call around 4:30 a.m. on the holiday.

They were told their daughter had been badly hurt in an apartment fire and was at Legacy Emanuel’s emergency department.

When they arrived, they learned Kelsi was conscious but severely burned. She couldn’t move her legs. Doctors began an emergency surgery that lasted five hours.

They asked if their daughter’s boyfriend had arrived at the hospital. They had never met Thompson’s parents but tracked down a number for his father in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and gave it to a hospital counselor.

As they remained in the waiting area, they were told Thompson had arrived by ambulance but didn’t make it.

Later that morning, Thompson’s parents separately called Sondra Edmonds and she said she broke the terrible news to each, confirming their son had died. She doesn’t know why officials hadn’t yet reached them. It was the first time the parents had spoken.

When Kelsi emerged from her first surgery hours later, her parents learned the staggering extent of her injuries: In addition to suffering massive burns, she had broken her back escaping, crushing her lower vertebrae, as well as fracturing a femur and an ankle.

Surgeons had fused her spine together. Two days later, they inserted a pin through her leg to fix her shattered right leg just below the hip.

On July 21, she turned 26. Nurses decorated her hospital room with balloons and banners, but she was too groggy to understand much of what was going on around her.

Hugging cat may have helped preserve skin

Kelsi has undergone a series of operations to remove her severely burned skin down to her living tissue. Doctors are progressively preparing to cover those areas eventually with her own skin.

Remarkably, her front upper chest was spared burns, perhaps because she may have been hugging her cat to her body as she escaped.

“It’s almost like Kelsi was holding her cat close to her because the left side of the cat’s body is completely burn free, and the right side is burned,” her mother said.

Kelsi’s healthy skin is expected to be used for skin grafts, her father said.

Her burns are deep in some areas, extending to her tendons and bones, said Dr. Niknam Eshraghi, medical director of the burn center and one of four surgeons working on her case.

“Having had this devastating injury of burns and trauma from jumping from a very high height, it makes this a very difficult, huge injury,” Eshraghi said. “I’m heartened how she’s been able to tolerate all of the trauma and shock of this.

“I’m hopeful we’ll be able to get her to fully be able to be functional. I want her to be a burn survivor rather than a burn victim.”

But he cautioned that Kelsi remains critically ill.

“What’s in her favor is that she’s young and fighting hard, but it’s a lifetime of recovery,” he said.

During the first week in August, surgeons had to remove her toes and the front part of her feet because they were so damaged and a source of infection, Eshraghi said.

Kelsi’s hands and arms also were burned and it’s not clear if she’ll be able to play the violin again – an instrument she took up when she was 9. She played violin in the Portland Metropolitan Youth Symphony and taught herself piano.

It’s simply too early to know, her parents said.

Kelsi may qualify for a rare procedure that involves growing her skin in a lab in Boston, her doctor said. If surgeons pursue the life-saving measure, she would be only the seventh patient in the burn center’s 50-year history to undergo the operation, Eshraghi said.

In the interim, the surgeons use frozen cadaver skin to cover the tissue as a temporary, protective measure. At times, they face setbacks with infections and have to adjust sedation and pain medications, he said. When her heart slowed a couple of times, they hooked her to an external pacemaker.

While Sondra and Brian Edmonds know Kelsi still faces possibly two more months in the hospital, they’re thinking ahead to the time when they hope to bring her home to recover.

They’re working to ensure that Kelsi’s cat Paloma is there waiting for her.

They were able to track down the cat via a friend of Thompson’s who spotted a neighbor’s Reddit post on the cat and are nursing her back to health.

A firefighter had found the partially singed cat near the apartment complex and a woman took the cat to DoveLewis Emergency Animal Hospital in northwest Portland. A stranger paid her initial vet bill. Kelsi’s other cat hasn’t been found.

“I cannot let anything happen to this cat,” Sondra Edmonds said.

“Kelsi loved that cat. We both think it’s important to have her here when she comes home.”

She had just received health insurance

Their daughter had moved out of the family home to live with Thompson in July 2020, a year before the fire.

The two had met online and shared the three-bedroom apartment with Gremillion and Kinney – the three men were longtime friends from Louisiana.

The young couple had recently been looking online for a house to rent or buy but couldn’t find anything in their price range, Brian Edmonds said.

While Thompson loved to cook, Kelsi was the baker, making cinnamon rolls, apple pie and homemade bread, her parents said. They liked to take day or weekend trips to the coast.

Kelsi graduated from Prairie High School in Vancouver and attended Evergreen College, where she studied environmental studies. She has one stepbrother.

She was working most recently for Columbia Laboratories, where she did lab work testing food for pesticide residue, herbicides and doing other nutritional analyses.

“She felt like she found a job she really loved,” her mother said.

A week before the fire, after about four months on the job, she proudly told her parents she had just received health insurance, her parents said.

Since their daughter’s hospitalization, Sondra and Brian Edmonds have focused on her day-to-day recovery while they continue to maintain their own jobs.

Sondra, who works in an accounting department, resumed her work part time, starting early and working through lunch. When she’s done, she heads to the burn center to visit Kelsi.

Brian is an electric company project manager and able to set his own hours. For 41 days straight, he spent several hours in the afternoon at his daughter’s bedside. That ended Monday, when more stringent COVID-19 safety restrictions barred the parents from visiting their daughter for the first time.

He has tasked himself with figuring out how else he can help Kelsi.

“Other than some clothes and her musical instruments that she still had in our house, she lost everything,” he said. “Cellphone, melted. Computers, melted. Every remnant of what she had, gone.”

He found her car parked less than a block away from the complex but didn’t have keys to it. He’s tried to get her mail and figure out if she had bills that needed to be paid.

Sondra Edmonds has read books to her daughter, the latest “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” a series of inspirational stories of people’s lives.

The two brought Kelsi’s favorite CDs to play in her room. Friends and relatives decorated the room with a large folding poster board of photos from her high school and college days. Her father added photos from home, with the well-wishes and many cards they’ve received.

“Once she wakes up, I want her to be able to see all that, all the support she has,” her mother said.

‘Don’t give us sadness’

Brian Edmonds said he takes his cues from the surgeons, nurses, counselors, nutritionists and other staff at the burn center.

“These people are amazing and they’re upbeat all the time,” he said. “Don’t give us sadness. Don’t give us, ‘Oh we’re sorry.’ Sorry is sadness. We need all the positive energy we can and we truly think it’s working.”

Sondra Edmonds said she tries not to dwell on what she can’t control.

“It does no good to be angry. I’m disappointed in the person who did it. I’d like him to know two lives are gone and my daughter is fighting for her life right now,” she said.

“Whoever did it, I’d like him to think before you do something stupid.”

Arson investigators are working to identify those responsible for the fire and consulting with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office to determine if the case warrants criminal prosecution for potential recklessness or negligence.

Brian Edmonds faults the Heidi Manor owner and apartment management for allowing two dumpsters – the plastic one that melted and a metal dumpster – to sit under apartments.

“If the dumpsters weren’t under there, and if they were out away from the buildings,” he said, “this wouldn’t have happened.”

On a recent Sunday, Sondra Edmonds found some solace during her visit with Kelsi.

As she arrived at her daughter’s room, the nurse announced to Kelsi that her mom was there.

“She opened her eyes and turned her head and looked at me and smiled at me. Then she moved both arms toward me as if she wanted to give me a hug.

“That made my day,” Sondra Edmonds said. “I took it as a very good day. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”