Another neighbor reported that when Willingham cried out for his babies he “did not appear to be excited or concerned.”
A neighbor said that he once heard Willingham yell at her, “Get up, bitch, and I’ll hit you again.”.
He said that he got up, felt around the floor for a pair of pants, and put them on.
The air smelled the way it had when their microwave had blown up, three weeks earlier—like “wire and stuff like that.”
“Oh God, I never felt anything that hot before,” he said of the heat radiating out of the room.
Willingham speculated that the fire might have been started by something electrical: he had heard all that popping and crackling.
Finally, Vasquez turned to Willingham and asked a seemingly random question: had he put on shoes before he fled the house?. »