WARWICK, Mass. -- Residents of a small Massachusetts town are grieving the deaths of a woman and her four children who perished in a house fire that reduced their home to rubble.
Dozens of churchgoers gathered at the Trinitarian Congregational Church in Warwick on Sunday for an emotional service, the Boston Globe reported.
"You can't live in a little town like Warwick without being moved by the shock, the grief, of it all," the Rev. Dr. Gordon Ellis said during the service.
The victims were killed when flames swept through their single-family home around 12:45 a.m. Saturday. Two other family members escaped with non-life threatening injuries.
Fire officials have not identified the victims or survivors, but Susan James told The Globe that her older sister, Lucinda Seago, and four of Seago's children died in the fire.
"There are no words really, truly," James said in a telephone interview Sunday. "She was a wonderful mother of five, including a younger child who was autistic. She was a devout Catholic and a darn good person."
Officials said Scott Seago and his daughter were taken to a hospital for treatment, The Globe said.
The cause of the blaze is still being investigated but authorities said initial indications are it was caused by a wood stove in the kitchen and was accidental in nature.
Over a dozen area fire departments helped battle the fire, but crews were hampered by bitter cold temperatures and the challenges of drawing water to battle a fire in the rural town of less than 800 residents, which has no fire hydrants.
