A Texas family of six, including a 1-year-old baby, narrowly escaped their burning home last Tuesday after an arsonist doused their porch in gasoline and set it aflame while they were asleep inside, according to harrowing security footage.
Darryl Wilson, 52, and his wife, Wahsheida, had a full house with all their adult children home for summer break when the hooded assailant ignited the blaze in the early morning hours.
The couple’s 21-year-old daughter, Malia Rivera, was still awake when the front stoop of the family’s two-story home in Midlothian went up in flames around 1 a.m. She’d seen the motion-sensor lights go on a little while earlier and clambered downstairs to check out the commotion, Darryl told Fox 4.
By the time she got downstairs, flames were already threatening to burst through their living room window.
She quickly called 911 and rushed to wake up her sleeping parents.
“She came running in there, and she said, ‘The house is on fire. I looked at her. I said, ‘Okay, I’m dreaming.’ I laid back down. She grabbed me — ‘No. No. The house is on fire,’” Darryl told CBS News.
“I was shocked. I’m like, this can’t be real. Who would do this? Like, we keep to ourselves,” Wahsheida added.
The frantic dad tried to use two cups of water to extinguish the flames before he resorted to using heavy-duty pots and pans while Wahsheida checked the home’s security.
Sure enough, Wahsheida quickly found chilling footage of a man in a sweatshirt dumping gasoline around the front of their house before setting it on fire and dashing away.
The blaze was eventually extinguished by the responding emergency crews and all residents were accounted for with no injuries, but the family is still shaken by the encounter.
“Your intentions when you came and threw gas on the house and lit that fire. Your intentions was to kill us. Like, you have no soul. You’re a heartless person,” Wahsheida seethed to the outlet.
Their 25-year-old daughter, Mylah Rivera, is most worried about her 1-year-old daughter and what could’ve happened if her younger sister hadn’t been awake when the fire started.
Now, the family sleeps in shifts so someone is always keeping watch as the arson suspect runs free.
“We’re on rotation, just staying up at night. Looking out the windows, looking on the camera. We’re on rotation. Someone sleeps, someone gets up to be on watch,” Wahsheida told the outlet.
In a desperate attempt to find some peace of mind, the family plans on moving as soon as they can.
“My kids don’t want to stay. My wife doesn’t want to stay. You know, they’re traumatized. It’s a hurting thing for someone to come to my home and do that. And I feel helpless as a father,” Darryl told Fox 4.
The family hopes most of all that the “sociopath” who attacked their home, “knowing that there’s kids [inside],” is caught and jailed.
