ROANOKE RAPIDS — When Kim Gabriel finally found her father, she picked up her life and moved to Roanoke Rapids to be near him. He has a variety of medical issues, she said, and Gabriel wanted to get to know him. Then Sunday her dream nearly went up in flames.

Roger Bell | The Daily Herald Thirteen-year-old Shelby Gabriel looks into what would have been her parents’ room, now destroyed by fire. The Gabriel family's rental home burned Sunday in Roanoke Rapids. Advertisement

“My parents had an ugly divorce,” Gabriel explained. “I wasn’t even born yet.”

After growing up not knowing her father — her only picture of him a military photograph taken when he entered the Navy — Gabriel finally started searching for him on the Internet. She placed an ad on an ancestry site and learned she had other family members in Roanoke Rapids.

“I have a brother and sister who live here and I didn’t even know I had,” Gabriel said.

“I contacted my sister-in-law first. She and I exchanged information and everything seemed to match up. I e-mailed (the picture of her father) to my sister-in-law and she called me up and said ‘my mother-in-law has the same picture at her house.’ We knew it was a picture of my Dad.”

“It’s quite dramatic when something like that takes place,” Bob Lyons, Gabriel’s father, said. “It was kind of awkward at first, but it worked out fine.”

“Shocked,” said Carrie Delbridge, Gabriel’s sister, when she recalled hearing the news she had another sibling. “It took a while but yeah, shock. I’m glad, but the first initial was just shock.”

Gabriel’s father suffers from congestive heart failure, diabetes, and glaucoma. His list of maladies, spurred Gabriel’s desire to know her father, and to help forge a relationship between him and her 13-year-old daughter Shelby.

“One of the reasons for the urgency was to spend what time he has left with him,” Gabriel said. “He used to wonder why God kept him alive because he should have died with all his medical problems. Now he says God kept him alive so I could find him.”

With the knowledge of her “new family,” Gabriel, her husband, her daughter and her two dogs picked up their lives and moved from Enid, Okla., to Roanoke Rapids to get to know her father and her siblings. They rented a home and settled in. A new phase of life was beginning with a new family to know.

Unfortunately, fire has badly burned this new life and Gabriel has lost nearly everything she owns.

It happened Sunday morning as the rest of the city dealt with the snow and ice from Friday and Saturday’s winter storm. Gabriel was staying with her father while preparing to move into a new rental house on Harris Street.

“We had just rented a house,” Gabriel said. “We didn’t have gas, so we hadn’t moved in yet. We had a couple of electric heaters we’d bought to keep the pipes from freezing and something happened to the one in the bathroom — not too sure what.”

The damage to the house has been extensive. “The whole front half of the house is destroyed,” Gabriel stated. “Everything that was in the front two rooms of the house is gone. The rest of the house is severely smoke damaged. The house is black.”

Even though they weren’t living there, Gabriel and her husband John placed nearly everything into the house in preparation for their occupancy. “We’d already moved our stuff over there — our furniture, our belongings, everything. All we have is a suitcase with one day’s worth of clothes in it.”

They had delayed completing the move because of the deposit needed to get the gas turned on. “Piedmont Gas required a $400 deposit and we simply didn’t have the money yet to pay for that,” Gabriel explained. “We just moved here. It was more than we could afford to come up with. Without gas, there was no heat and no hot water in the house so we couldn’t stay there yet.”

Now fire has destroyed their home and most of what they own, and the Gabriel family must deal with this loss as they try to adjust to a new life in a new town with new relatives.

“I’m just sorry this happened to them,” Delbridge stated. “They moved here from Oklahoma and didn’t have much and now they’ve lost everything. Kim and John were just trying to keep the pipes from freezing.”

“I know it’s just stuff,” Gabriel said. “But it’s everything we had. My great-grandparents’ wedding picture was hanging on a wall. I’ve never gone through anything like this so I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do next.”

Donations of food or clothing for the Gabriel family can be made at C&W Florist in Roanoke Rapids between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday-Friday and Saturday between 9 a.m. and noon. The Weldon Fire Department has also volunteered its fire station across from Halifax Community College as a drop-off location for donations as well.

Anyone with questions can call John Gabriel at 252-236-8967.