UNC players ok after apartment fire

From The Charlotte Obersver.

Michael McAdoo awoke Monday morning in a hotel with only the clothes he was wearing and the shoes on his feet. Two days earlier, the North Carolina defensive end had everything he needed to live the life of a college student. Now, he has nothing.

McAdoo and Tar Heels teammate Kevin Reddick are trying to put their lives back together after a fire Saturday destroyed their Durham apartment and everything in it.

“I really haven’t been getting a lot of sleep like if I was at home,” McAdoo said. “I still ask myself, ‘Is this really real? Did this really happen to me?’ Waking up knowing I don’t have a home, knowing I only have one outfit and one pair of shoes.”

It all happened so quickly. In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, Reddick assumed his pizza had arrived. He figured that banging noise had to be the delivery man knocking at the door.

“I just happened to look outside,” Reddick, a linebacker, said. “I’m not sure what told me to look, but I saw shingles coming off the roof.

“I thought someone was working on the roof, so I didn’t pay any mind, but as I was closing the blinds, I saw fire out the window. I grabbed my shoes and left.”

McAdoo had just left the house when Reddick called him to say there was a fire.

“I said, ‘Put it out, then,’” McAdoo said.

By the time he got back to the complex, and the road outside was blocked by police, he knew how serious it was.

In minutes, the fire spread throughout the building from the fourth-floor apartment above McAdoo and Reddick’s third-floor apartment.

No residents were injured, but five firefighters were treated for heat exhaustion after battling the blaze, and 22 people were left homeless by an improperly discarded cigar.

McAdoo and Reddick lost everything: clothes, shoes, computers, TVs, video games, all the accoutrements of a college life. Students everywhere, take note: Reddick and McAdoo had renters insurance, so they will have money to start over.

“I didn’t really lose anything that couldn’t be replaced,” McAdoo said. “As long as I have my life, I’m OK. Everything else can be replaced.”

But the ring commemorating the state championship Reddick won at New Bern cannot be replaced, nor the pictures of his daughter Kamalani, 11 months old.

If Reddick had time to grab one more thing on his way out the door, he would have grabbed the iPad with the pictures of his daughter stored on it. But leaving the iPad behind might have saved his life, as quickly as the fire moved.

“I’ve just been trying to stay focused and not let it get me down,” he said. “It got me down the first couple days. I’m just trying to blow it off, but it’s not the easiest thing to blow off.”

McAdoo and Reddick are trying to figure out where they’re going to live this fall.

Of everything they’ll learn in their time at North Carolina, perhaps no lesson will be as important as this one: “I would just say, never take anything for granted,” McAdoo said. “Appreciate everything that you have, because one day you can wake up and it could be gone.”

The two sophomores get three more nights at the hotel courtesy of the Red Cross, but after that they’ll have to stay with friends until they can find a new place to live. When they wake up today, they will still have nothing, except the consolation that it could have been so much worse.
luke.decock@newsobserver.com, twitter.com/LukeDeCock or 919-829-8947