Local family copes with aftermath 
of deadly fire that gutted their home

Ava and Darrin Telfer had everything they needed. A home in a dream location — close to school and church. A backyard big enough for their four kids to run and play, with a swing set and a small basketball court and enough dandelions to always pick another one if the last wish didn’t come true.

Then one night, a little more than a month ago, Ava got a frantic call from her youngest child, Bess.

“I couldn’t understand her at first,” Ava said. “I thought she kept saying ‘spider.’”

But it wasn’t eight-legged creatures that had the little girl sobbing into the receiver — a fire was ripping through the family’s Prairie City home. Bess, 7, and her 9-year-old brother, Isaac, had just escaped the house after a smoke detector started wailing. Using the instructions Ava went over repeatedly with them, the kids grabbed the family dog and went to the neighbor’s house across the street to call 911.

Local fire fighters responded and doused the flames, but they were helpless to stop more damage from being done. The electrical fire, which started from a ceiling fan in the bathroom, was making its way through the ranch-style home in an air duct in the attic, gutting the house from the inside out.

The home is now boarded up, still smelling a month later like a family cookout gone bad. Yellow tape hugs the entryways and says “FIRE LINE DO NOT CROSS.” Inside, the only things not dressed in black are a few photos and a half-charred baby car seat. The family of six lost almost everything, except each other.

As time has passed, the Telfers have acknowledged that tragedy can sometimes be a blessing in disguise. Before the fire, Ava ran a daycare in the home.

“Realistically, if (the fire) had happened three hours before, there would have been a house full of daycare kids,” she said. “Three hours later, and we all would have been asleep. We’re so relieved. If it had to happen, it happened at the perfect time.”

Timing has continued to go the Telfer’s way. The same night of the fire, the family’s church, First Reformed, offered the vacant parsonage as a place to stay.

“In a matter of six hours, they gave us a place where we could be together,” Ava said. “We’re a family of six. We’re not a small family. Being there gives the kids a sense of stability.”

Since then, Ava and Darrin, who works full time for Iowa College Student Aid Commission and also coach high school football at PCM High School, have been trying to provide normalcy for their four children — Bess, Isaac, Leevi (9 years old) and Grace (12) — by making sure they get to their various sporting events and functions.

“We’re still working on a few things, but they’re pretty good kids,” Darrin said. “We’re doing all right.”

Much of the credit for staying afloat, the Telfers say, should go to their friends and fellow community members. Over the last month, people have given up their time, food and clothing to help in any way possible.

“We’re humbled and just kind of overwhelmed by the generosity of everyone in Prairie City, Monroe — the Jasper County area as a whole,” Darrin said. “We want to thank everyone. We don’t want to miss anybody.”

The Telfers will have an opportunity to thank many of these people in person Sunday, when an alumni basketball game fundraiser takes place at 2 p.m. The event was originally planned to support the PCM football program but was changed to a benefit for the Telfers once head coach Dar Dahms realized how much the family of his friend and fellow coach had lost. The Telfers are still going through the process of calculating what was destroyed in the fire for insurance purposes.

“I think sometimes when you coach ... we actually spend more time with each other than we do with our family sometimes,” Dahms said. “You get close and think of each other as brothers.

“We try to do things with our football team to help others out and I thought this was a great opportunity.”

The event, which will be preceded by a silent auction at 1 p.m., was expected to feature several Northern Iowa basketball players but had to be changed to a standard alumni game due to scheduling conflicts. Despite not having UNI players in attendance, the free event is still expected to draw quite a crowd in support of the Telfers, event organizer Brian Briles said.

“I think there’s good community spirit from the PCM district as a whole,” said Briles, who is also Darrin’s second cousin. Since word has spread about what happened to the Telfers, donations have come pouring in. Among the items being auctioned Sunday will be tickets to sporting events at almost every university in Iowa as well as an assortment of items donated by Microsoft.

Whatever comes of the fundraiser, the Telfers say they are already more grateful for the support they’ve received than they could ever express. As Ava said, “The thing we lost (from the fire) is a sense of home. Not identity, but home.”

But as the people of Prairie City have shown, home isn’t always confined to the walls of your own house.