I have been reading more about 15-year-old twins Jerrell and Joshua Williamson, who have autism, and the more I read, the sadder the story gets. Jerrell died late on Saturday night, December 23rd. According to authorities, one of the twins set fire to a pile of paper under their bed with a cigarette lighter as their mother, Carolyn Stone, and her boyfriend, Ray Pulliam, were watching television downstairs in their Frederick, Maryland townhouse. As noted in an article in the December 26th Washington Post, Stone does not know how a lighter was brought into the house, as she and Pulliam do not smoke; last year, her oldest son had brought a lighter into their house. The twins had found and used it to start a small fire that was quickly extinguished.
Stone noted that Jerrell and Joshua had a habit of placing
…. “everything, everything that’s valuable to them under the bed,” their mother said.
[Stone] said she took care to clean out the area every week or so. But she had let it accumulate longer this month because she was working overtime at her job at a wholesale music dealer. “I said to them, ‘We’re going to clean all this junk this weekend,’ ” she recalled, bursting into tears.
Stone, Pulliam, and Joshua are now staying in a Residence Inn.
Not comprehending his mother’s grief, Joshua silently opened two giant bags of Christmas toys donated by firefighters.
“This is keeping him preoccupied,” Pulliam said, “because he doesn’t know how to react.”
At one point, Joshua pointed to his brother’s smoke-stained jacket hanging in a closet and said, “That’s Jerrell’s.” He thinks his brother is asleep.
Jerrell was more verbal than Joshua; the Maryland fire marshal said that Joshua started the fire in a press release on Sunday. The boys were born three minutes apart and were always together.
What might Stone be thinking, what might Joshua be thinking—-one can barely imagine.