'All of us have taken this personal': Bullhead City comes together at vigil for 5 children

BULLHEAD CITY — As the sun dipped behind the mountains across the Colorado River on Wednesday evening, grief-stricken residents of this northwest Arizona community started to pull up at a park along the banks.

Four days had elapsed since the tragedy, a house fire that killed five children. Four of the children were siblings who lived in the home — a 13-year-old boy, a 5-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy — and one was a relative, an 11-year-old boy who was visiting.

On Wednesday, people gathered to remember them, and to try to come to grips with a tragedy that has engulfed the city.

“It’s earth-shaking,” said Rebecca Crizer, who arrived early at the vigil. “All of us are tied together, some way, somehow. All of us have taken this personal.”

Bullhead City, a tight-knit town of about 40,000 people, sits at the junction of Arizona, Nevada and California. Across the river in Nevada, Laughlin's casino lights glitter.

Crizer has lived in Bullhead City for 12 years. It’s changed in that time, she said, edging ever-so-slightly away away from the small town dynamic. But it’s still slow-paced, the kind of place where people know their neighbors, where there’s always time for a chat.

“That is how it is here,” she said.

Crizer is a funeral arranger at Dimond & Suns, a local funeral home that has offered to cover expenses for the five children.

“There’s no way we would ever hand the family a bill after a situation like this,” she said. “It’s not right.”

She likened the fire to a gray cloud hanging over the entire town.

She doesn’t personally know the families at the center of the tragedy, but in classic Bullhead City fashion, her daughter went to school with one of the kids who died, and she knows some of their relatives.

“It hasn’t been, ‘Oh, did you hear about the kids on Anna Circle?' It’s ‘Are you OK? How are you feeling?'" she said. “Because it has affected everybody.”

'We're a tight community'

These community connections were apparent at Rotary Park, where organizers set up loudspeakers and entwined lights around the arms of a large tree that would serve as the vigil’s locus.

People lined up to receive candles and write messages on a large piece of brown butcher’s paper. Some were personalized, signed off from friends or relatives. Many simply wrote “God bless.”

“We’re a tight community,” said Natasha Taggart, a Bullhead City resident who attended the vigil with her 13-year-old daughter, Quinn. “Whether you know them personally, you know them. The grandmother works at a local place, we see her quite often.”

Taggart said she and Quinn had come to the vigil to let the family know they had a support system.

“Seeing a kid the age of me and my little brother, it’s just heartbreaking,” Quinn added. “It could have been anybody.”

The blaze started about 5 p.m. Saturday in a two-story duplex not far from the park. An initial investigation suggested it roared up the house’s only staircase, trapping the kids upstairs.

The father of the siblings told investigators he had been gone for about two and a half hours, buying groceries and Christmas gifts.

The house is now surrounded by a security fence, deemed unsafe to enter. There are charred walls, blown out windows, a gaping hole in the roof.

Outside is a growing collection of flowers and toys. There was a Paddington bear and Squishmallows and Hot Wheels, a plush ninja and a rainbow unicorn, and prayer candles.

Some of the offerings had come in fives. There were five white crosses, pinned to the fence over yellow caution tape. Five small Christmas stockings. Five balloons, four blue and one pink.

Tears flow, on the banks of the river

On Wednesday evening, people gathered around the lit-up tree until the crowd had swelled to about 300, solemn faces illuminated by flickering candlelight.

Some engaged in hushed conversations. Some stared at the photos of the five children, set up at the front. Some cried.

More tears were shed as a woman sang "Amazing Grace," and then more as a handful of people got up to speak.

A pastor spoke about how it was normal, at times like these, to feel angry at God. “But the one we're angry at is the one you need the most,” he said.

A neighbor told of taking the 5-year-old boy to church. “He was fun, vibrant and full of joy,” she said.

A young friend of the older boy bravely got up to speak about him.

“He was my best friend,” she said, sounding nervous, standing alongside a supporter.

“When he first moved to the block, I was the first one to come up to him and say 'hi.' And ever since that day, we've played outside all the time. We'd go skateboarding. We would walk to the stores.”

She remembered one walk in particular, when, in the way kids do, they got “paranoid” in the dark. “We had a lot of fun together,” she said.

She added, her voice heavy, that she regretted sometimes saying no to hanging out.

“I kind of wish I had said yes more,” she said. “And that I got to have more memories with him.”

More about it: What caused Bullhead City fire that killed 5 children?

As they all spoke, a crying woman hugged a crying child, each of them consoling the other. A babbling baby drew sad smiles. A shiny balloon escaped into the sky.

Family members, some unsteady with grief, cried and hugged one another.

Among them was Cassandra Geiser, who said she was related to some of the children through her brother.

“They were just beautiful, wonderful souls,” she said. “They had the best personalities.”

Geiser flicked through recent photos of the children on her phone, her voice thick with disbelief as she recalled the happy day they were taken.

“Everybody was smiling,” she said. “Everybody was having a blast. It was just an amazing day. And then tragedy hit.”

As the event ended, organizer Grace Hecht, a City Council member who operates the local nonprofit Make Bullhead Better, gestured to the Colorado River as a sign of optimism, even in tragedy.

“As our river flows behind us, it’s a beautiful representation of life, that it keeps flowing in the hard times and the good times," she said.

She pointed out that the tree behind her, festooned with lights, had five main arms, one for each child who died.“I hope that this place becomes a place that each of us can come back to," she said, "to remember these beautiful children.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Bullhead City residents hold vigil to remember children killed in fire