Easton Fire Victims: 'There Was Love in That House'

Before last week, Jason Soto's neighbors at 724 Spring Garden Street in Easton were just passing acquaintances.

But he could see enough to know they were happy. Joy Lozier and her four-year-old son Makai Peters and her cousin James Strickland always seemed to have smiles on their faces. 

"You could just tell there was love in that house," Soto said Friday evening, at a memorial service for Lozier, Peters and Strickland, killed Monday in one of the worst fires in recent city history.

Now the house is condemned, and the community is grieving. Hundreds of people packed into the Green Pastures Community Church on North 10th Street to remember the three young lives—Lozier and Strickland were 24 and 25—lost in the fire.

"Our hearts began to ache," when news of the fire broke, said Pastor Don Griffin. "And truthfully, they have not stopped aching yet."

People wept throughout the service. Few people spoke. Some who did, did so through so through sobs, and finished well under the allotted two minutes.

There was applause when the Wilson Childcare Academy announced it would provide free childcare and before/after school care for Gregory, Makai's little brother, who was saved from the fire.

"Our hearts are broken," an academy representative said. "We all loved Makai so very much. He brought so much life to the center."

This is a family that's known horror and loss. In 2009, Strickland's three-year-old son Elijah was murdered by Elijah's mother's boyfriend Eugenio Torres. Lozier lost her mother to a fire in Phillipsburg in 2006.

Soto spoke of Lozier, Strickland and Peters being reunited with their loved ones after death.

"I know he's home. He's with his son," he said. "Joy's with her mother. Makai's in the arms of his grandmother."

Soto said the family has reached out to his since the fire, asking if there was anything he needed.

He was more than just a neighbor. On the morning of the fire, it was he that rescued Gregory, climbing onto his roof and then lowering the toddler to his son.

"We did what we could," Soto said. "We tried to do more."