Teresa Kohnle
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Until a fire left their lives in ruins. It's what they refer to as a full alarm. Dispatch three engines and a ladder truck and an EMS unit. One day we're living the dream, and the next day we don't know what we're going to do. As authorities try to make sense of this tragedy, secrets soon emerge from the ashes. Having this illness, he's not able to work as much, can't provide for the family. They were close to the house going into foreclosure. It was very bleak for them. Was this the last act of a devoted and desperate father or a cold-blooded betrayal? Her affairs have been going on for a while. He caught her several times, once actually in the act of cheating on him. She would benefit highly if you have a fire that takes out the home and the husband.
He told me he wanted to die.
June 29, 2007, Ringgold, Georgia. It's 9.34 a.m. in the quiet town along the Tennessee border when a proprietor of a local grocery store sees smoke rising from a nearby home. Gary Carlock owned his family's store, Carlock's Grocery. He was the one that first saw the flames and the smoke and called it in. Seven miles away, firefighters with engine aid are starting their day when they get the call. It's what they refer to as a full alarm. Dispatch three engines and a lighter truck. I'm in an EMS unit. No relay. There's now flames visible. So you're trying to get your game plan, trying to think your way through it. Firefighters arrive at 9.42 a.m. to learn from command they can't contain this from the outside. They are going in.
The fire looked like it was on the rear side of the home. It would come in from the unburned side. So when we talk about the importance of priorities, you think you may be putting fire out, you may also be having a victim in there. We go through this first hallway and we're immediately met with extreme heat and smoke conditions. The visibility was pretty low. We made it to the back bedroom. We'd realized that was the fire room for sure. We'd suppressed that fire back, and one of the guys with us, he was using a thermal imaging camera. The technology is capable of picking up a person's heat signature through smoke. As the fireman scans the room, an unsettling shape appears on the screen. He notified us that he did see what looked like the victim towards the backside of the bed. When we made it around to him, what I remember is he was kneeling by the bed in a sense. Almost as if he was praying or something. He was unconscious, but he didn't appear to have thermal burns. He definitely had smoke on his clothes, on his skin.
Usually victims are found very close to the door. They succumb where they just physically can't exert any more energy while they're trying to remove themselves from an environment. They preliminarily ID the victim as the homeowner, James Conley. Jim Conley was a local chiropractor who had a practice in Dalton, Georgia nearby.
Although Jim Conley wasn't from North Georgia, he found it the perfect place to build a career as a small-town chiropractor. My dad kind of grew up all over the place. We come from a kind of a wealthy background. My great-grandfather was Frederick Conley, who founded Modern Markings and invented one of the first price tag machines. They have over 300 patents. However, Jim bucked the family business and the money that came with it to make a name for himself in a new profession. First time I met him, he had just started out and he was in the back of a beauty shop. He had his chiropractor business back there. And I went in there for adjustments. I did his books and he did the chiropractic adjustments for all my kids and grandchildren.
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