Family safe; house burned

GARFIELD — His house in ashes, Randen Harmon shook his head in disbelief saying he still didn’t know how he felt.

His two-bedroom house was destroyed Thursday evening by a fire that began near the back of the house. Firefighters from Northeast Benton County, Avoca and Pea Ridge volunteer fire departments began arriving shortly before 5 p.m. at the rural residence south of Arkansas Highway 127 out of Garfield.

Standing in the dark illuminated by the alternating red and white lights of the fire trucks,Harmon said he was glad his family was safe, the said he’d lost a daughter to a fire five years ago.

“She was one of the Frazier Five,” he said. Katelyn Mahmens, 9, was one of five girls who died in a house fire in Bentonville in March 2008.

Harmon said he’d been working on the back deck “fixin’ the plumbing” when he busted a pipe and went to a friend’s house to get another piece of pipe. He said he visited for a bit when he received a call from another friendwho told him he saw smoke coming from the area of his house.

“I wasn’t gone but 30 or 40 minutes,” he said, adding that even if he had been home, he had the water shut off and couldn’t have extinguished a fire.

Harmon is a construction worker. He and his wife, Jessica, have two sons, Raven, 6, and Robson, 9. The boys go to school at Garfield Elementary.

The Harmons own the two-bedroom, 1,200-square foot home at 12900 Rosario Road and have lived there for 11 years, Harmon said.

“My first thought was disbelief,” he said. “I thought it must have been a neighbors’.”

A friend of the family, Sheron Rohrbough, said: “They are great people.

They both work hard. If anybody deserves help, they do.”