CARBONDALE - Thankful to escape safely from her burning mobile home with her five children Tuesday, the only items Tasha Oliver saved besides the clothes on their backs and one television is a jar of charred baby formula and a portrait taken of her father with four of her kids.

"I'm lost," Oliver said. "I feel like I've done and lost it."

Yet, the 24-year-old single mom is in better shape than she was Tuesday around noon as Carbondale firefighters extinguished flames from one of the bedrooms. Smoke and heat destroyed the rest of her mobile home located in The Crossings Mobile Home Park at 1400 N. Illinois Ave. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

"All I know is when I saw heat and fire I went from one end of the trailer to another," Oliver said, ushering her young ones out of the house. "I had to run back to get my baby."

Oliver and her children have huddled up in a motel room at America's Best Value Inn on the east side of Carbondale.

They are split between two beds with her son Zanidrelle, 6, twin boys Davaris and Tavaris, 5, daughter Zakhiaya, 2, and son Semaj, two weeks old.

"The Red Cross, they were a big help," Oliver said. "They supplied us with the room."

But that room runs out today and Oliver said she should be moving into a new mobile home, but she doesn't have anything to put in it.

Sandy Webster, director of the Little Egypt Network of the American Red Cross, said the agency provides immediate emergency needs: "whatever they need the first week after the fire."

Then the agency refers families to agencies such as local food pantries or clothing shelters depending on which of the 14 counties they live in.

The network budgets about $40,000 for fire disaster relief, but in recent years that hasn't seemed to be enough, especially this year.

Last year there were eight fires in February that Webster's agency responded to. This year, in the first week of February, they have already responded to nine house fires and spent about $13,000.

"It's really, really tight right now," she said. "You don't get a lot of donations for fires. It's been really bad."

Oliver has received help from agencies other than the Red Cross, such as the Southern Illinois Fire Relief Fund and a neighbor who handed her a $100 bill.

"I didn't even get his name," she said.

But she still needs help getting back on her feet.

"Everything we've got now has been from support of people - clothes; a couple of vouchers," she said. "I don't know, I think I need God."

What she might have received is an angel.

On Friday, without solicitation, Bill Davis showed up at the Carbondale office of The Southern Illinoisan. He had read her story in Wednesday's newspaper and has friends who are Oliver's neighbors.

"Every once in a while I would see (the friends) and go over," he said. "Her kids would come by and they would say hello. She's gone through a rough time."

He was in Chicago earlier this week moving his mother into assisted living and brought most of her furniture home.

"I already have all that stuff, so I started thinking," he said. "If she wants it, she can have it."

kristen.cates@thesouthern.com

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