Sparks from coal fire blamed for blaze that claimed an entire family

SPARKS from a banked-up coal fire may have caused a blaze in which a South Yorkshire family of four died, an inquest heard yesterday..

Mark Colley, 29, his wife Michelle, 25, and their son Lewis, three, were pronounced dead at the scene of the blaze and daughter Sophie, five, died two days later in hospital.

Mrs Colley was due to give birth to the couple’s third child, which they had already named Ashton, two days later. Doctors delivered the baby by Caesarean section but he did not survive.

Fire investigators pinpointed the cause of the blaze to an electrical fault in the living room, but Doncaster coroner Nicola Mundy decided an ember from the coal fire was the likeliest cause of the fire in the family’s mid-terrace home in Highfields, Doncaster.

She said: “It seems to me that the most likely cause was the banking up process of the open fire when they went to bed, which may have caused sparks to come out and they could have been smouldering away.”

Neighbours battled in vain to rescue the family when the fire broke out in the early hours of Sunday, March 29 last year.

Donald Hadden and Ross Ewing told how they tried to save the family, who were trapped upstairs, as a crowd of 50 people tried to help.

Mr Hadden said he tried to put a ladder up but the extension would not work.

He said: “Michelle and Mark were at the window. We could see them gasping for air. People were encouraging them to jump.

“I saw Michelle first. She looked more like a black person, there was that much smoke coming out of the window.

“I tried to encourage Mark to get the kids and throw them out of the window. There was enough of us to catch them.

“He just said: ‘I can’t see or breathe or do anything’.”

Ms Mundy recorded four verdicts of accidental death.