Woman Who Lost Daughters, Parents In Christmas Fire Thought Ashes Were Safe

The woman whose three daughters and parents were killed when her Stamford, CT home was destroyed in a Christmas Day fire gave an interview to the Today Show that aired today. It's as distressing as you might expect—in her conversation with Matt Lauer, Madonna Badger recalls the tragic night in vivid detail. Particularly devastating is her revelation that she almost decided to take the ashes and embers that caused the fire out of the mudroom and put them outside.

Badger's boyfriend, Michael Borcina, had ran his hands over the fireplace ashes before putting them on top of a plastic bin in the mudroom. "I remember thinking to myself, `I should put that outside. I should put that outside,' " Badger tells Lauer. “Then I remembered thinking, `No, but I watched him put his hands through it.' " Badger also debunks the theory that the ashes were removed from the fireplace because the children were worried about Santa Claus getting burned.

Badger, an advertising executive in NYC, said she tried several times to rescue her daughters, but the smoke was overwhelming. "I couldn't get in the window and I'm just screaming for somebody to help me,” she said, explaining that she could not see her daughters. “It was the blackest smoke I've ever seen. If I could have seen them, I would have gone in. It's impossible to describe how it is that you can't go in and save your own children, but I couldn't get through that smoke. I couldn't."

Here's the full interview below, which concludes with Badger demanding to know why her house was torn down the day after the fire, possibly destroying crucial evidence. Earlier this month, Badger announced that she would sue Stamford officials for $3 million for property damage, civil rights violations and the intentional destruction of evidence.