Gay, who was to celebrate her 29th birthday Friday, ran back inside the burning duplex at 2822 E. First St. Thursday night to save four children inside.
She never made it out.
Her 3-month-old son Cameron Treadwell and daughter Mirissa Gay, 4, died from the flames and smoke, investigators said.
A 10-year-old jumped off the front-porch roof to escape the flames and is expected to be OK, fire officials said. A 6-year-old child that walked out a back door was not injured.
Preliminary indications are the fire started after Kennetha Gay fell asleep on a sofa while smoking a cigarette, fire officials said. An official cause will not be made until autopsies are completed.
The Dayton Fire Department received a call reporting smoke from the house at 9:16 p.m. and were on the scene three minutes later, Fire Director Herbert Redden said.
Tranel Philpot, boyfriend of the family’s female neighbor, said he looked in the home when he heard a smoke detector, then a child screaming and saw a couch in the living engulfed in flames.
Philpot said he saw Kennetha Gay outside the home, but she went back in after her children.
The home’s owner and landlord, Mark Pardue, said he arrived before 10 p.m. and watched as medics performed CPR on Mirissa Gay.
“That was more than I could take,” he said. “Those kids were great — a bunch of cracker jacks.”
It took firefighters more than 45 minutes to put out the blaze. An adequate airflow due to open doors might have accelerated the flames, officials said.
The estimated damage to the home was $40,000, along with another $20,000 in content-damage, investigators said.
Kennetha Gay’s family did not make any statements Friday morning. A call trying to reach her boyfriend, Robert Treadwell, father of Cameron and one of the surviving children, went unanswered.
Five people have now died of injuries sustained during fires in the city this year, slightly below a three year average of about seven, Redden said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2494 or lsullivan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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