At around 4 a.m. on Dec. 8, Starr Adams awoke in her Northampton home to the sound of a smoke alarm going off and fumes wafting through the air. Her husband, Sherid, was downstairs asleep in his easy chair, and when Starr got to him after fighting through smoke in the stairwell, she found that a small fire had started beside him.
After attempting to put out the fire without success, Starr became solely focused on getting her husband to safety.
“In your mind you always say, gee, if there was a fire, I would do this, I would grab this, and grab that,” she said. “Forget it. It does not work like that at all.”
After Sherid, who normally uses a walker and was still recovering from a recent surgery, fell onto the floor, Starr mustered the strength and adrenaline to drag him into the kitchen, inhaling smoke the whole way. That’s when the power went out in their home.
“It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever encountered in my life,” she recalled.
Fortunately, the kitchen of their home, located on Kennedy Road in Leeds, leads right to the driveway where the couple’s truck was parked. Starr managed to help get her husband into the vehicle, then began pounding on the horn and screaming for help. A neighbor who lived across the road and was having trouble sleeping that night heard Starr’s cries for help. He brought Starr and Sherid back to his place while his girlfriend called 911.
Firefighters and EMTs soon showed up to put out the fire and examine the couple. Starr first thought the ambulance was there to take just her husband, and she protested when they said they wanted to take her as well. Then an EMT worker took a picture on his phone and showed her what her face looked like.
“It was totally black,” she said. “He said I had major smoke inhalation.”
While the couple was taken to Bay State Hospital for treatment at first, Starr was quickly moved to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she was admitted as a Jane Doe due to having lost her purse and phone in the blaze. When she next awoke, she had a tube down her throat and needed a white board to communicate.
The fire claimed nearly everything the Adamses owned, with their house being considered a total loss. Starr, who plays fiddle in a local band known as Wild Thyme, lost both of her violins. Sherid, an artist and sign maker, lost nearly all of his paintings, save a few in the garage that survived. As Starr was in her nightgown when the fire occurred, all of her clothes were destroyed.
Meanwhile, back on Kennedy Road, friends and neighbors were getting together to figure out how to help out the couple.
“On Kennedy Road, the houses are spaced far apart, but we are a close group of neighbors,” said Rachael Hagerstrom, who lives on the road and works as a social media manager at Smith College. “All the neighbors started reaching out to each other either with emails or text.”
Hagerstrom began a GoFundMe page, with a stated goal of $10,000 to support Starr and Sherid.
“Starr and Sherid Adams are beloved members of the Kennedy Road community, the kind of people who are always willing to lend a hand or a wheelbarrow, who have often dropped off extra fruit and vegetables from their prolific garden,” the GoFundMe page reads. “We, their friends and Kennedy Road neighbors, hope to raise funds to assist them with immediate costs, particularly as they deal with ongoing medical treatment.”
Lisa Moran, the person who called 911 following the fire, also posted on the local buy-nothing Facebook groups to help support the cause.
“They are absolutely wonderful sweethearts,” said Moran about Starr and Sherid. “Starr grows flowers, and would always bring over some when she had extra.”
Diana Gordon, another neighbor who has lived on Kennedy Road for more than 30 years, gave Starr a laptop so that she could once again communicate with friends and family. Like Starr, Gordon is also a musician, playing the piano.
“I admire her tremendously,” Gordon said of Starr. “We have an instant camaraderie whenever we cross paths.”
In addition to her musical activities, Starr is recently retired from teaching at Hampshire Regional School in Westhampton, and many staff members there also pitched in to help out. Starr’s bandmates in Wild Thyme also helped promote the GoFundMe page.
“The support and love from the community has just been overwhelming,” Starr said. “You don’t realize how much people care until you’re going through a situation like this.”
The GoFundMe has succeeded far beyond its original $10,000 goal, with more than $27,400 raised as of Dec. 29. Thanks to help from her Kennedy Road neighbors, Starr Adams now has a computer, a cellphone and new clothes to wear. She is currently staying at a neighbor’s residence while Sherid remains in the hospital recovering from a second surgery.
“It reminds her that she’s not alone,” Gordon said. “We are all here with her.”
Starr also received a violin from a musician friend of hers, and is getting ready to play with her band for the first time since the fire.
“I haven’t played in a month, and forget about singing right now,” she said. “But that will come back.”
Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.
