By Jeanne Brooks
STAFF WRITER
jmbrooks@greenvillenews.com

Travis Cale believed in the world and other people. "He wanted the world to be a good place," said his grandmother, Sara Payne. "He believed it was."
Maybe that explained his trademark smile and sunny spirit. "
His smile was like a movie star's," she said. "Travis was one who was always happy. He had masses of friends, girls and boys." Friendship, like math, was one of his talents.
"If you gave him a problem" -- without a calculator or paper and pencil -- "he gave you an answer right away," Payne said.
Travis had dark curly hair and looked like his mother. He had wanted to go to the University of South Carolina for nearly forever.
"He wore a Carolina-red USC cap all the time," his grandmother recalled. "It was faded and shaped to his head. He had that same hat I don't know how many years."
He played the guitar. "One of his friends taught him how. But he wouldn't play for you much."
And he liked to fish. "Fishing was his passion," one of his aunts wrote in a draft of a statement. "He could catch a fish in a mud puddle!"
"Many a day," Payne recalled, "he'd come home from school and walk into the garage and pick up a fishing pole." Usually there were friends going with him.
Sometimes he fished before school, too.
His mother taught him ballroom dancing and the shag when he was about middle-school age.
And his manners were almost immaculate. "He never allowed anyone, old or young, to go through a door that he didn't open," his aunt wrote. And "he carried groceries and suitcases for complete strangers."
Travis' grandmother remembered, "It was 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, ma'am' with him."
He liked banana pudding and to sleep in of a morning.
He was very close to his older brother, Burns.
And he liked Thanksgiving in Dillon County with 50 to 70 members of his extended family. His grandmother recalls how he and his cousins would get up games of baseball under the pecan trees.
He graduated from J.L. Mann High School, where he played outfield on the varsity baseball team. He also loved playing church basketball.
Travis was 19 and in his sophomore year at USC.
He hadn't yet settled on what he wanted to be in life.
"His lifespan was short," Payne said. But the world was better for it. "He made it a better place."
His aunt wrote, "Young children always came right up to Travis and asked him to play."



Travis Cale.

Emily Yelton: "She was a ray of sunshine. She was fun"

Published: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 - 5:37 pm
Updated: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 - 8:26 pm

By Ron Barnett
STAFF WRITER
rbarnett@greenvillenews.com

Even as the family of Clemson University sophomore Emily Yelton waited for official notification, they already knew the tragic truth: She was among the victims.
"We know Emily was there and we know that she is gone," said her mother, Kim Yelton.
Emily, who is survived by an identical twin, Meredith, also a Clemson student, was at the beach house with friends she had gone to school with at J.L. Mann High who are now students at the University of South Carolina, her mother said.
"She was a ray of sunshine. She was fun. She was larger than life. She never met a stranger," her mother said.
Emily, who turned 19 in August, was in the process of changing her major from marketing to early childhood education because of her love for children, according to her mom.
She had been a volunteer swim coach and often took kids from her neighborhood in Simpsonville to the movies.
"She just loved children and they loved her," Kim Yelton said.
Her mom had talked with Emily at about 9:30 p.m. Saturday, while her friends were engrossed in the USC-Tennessee football game and Emily was reveling in Clemson’s defeat over Maryland earlier in the day.
She told her mother about how she and her boyfriend, Travis Cale, who also died in the fire, had gone fishing that afternoon and had made friends with an elderly man at the pier.
The family takes some comfort at least in word from the authorities that Emily apparently didn’t suffer.
"To hear that she went peacefully in her sleep is a huge relief," her mother said. "And I’m also sure that she is in heaven. I know exactly what age she became a Christian."
Emily grew up attending Buncombe Street United Methodist Church and had been going to Brookwood Community Church at the time of her death, her mother said.
Emily’s father, Jeff Yelton, is a vice president at Scansource, and her mother is a part-time tennis instructor.
As to her twin sister, who also was one of her roommates at Clemson, she is understandably taking the loss hard, her mother said.
"She felt like half of herself was gone," she said.
The outpouring of support from the community and across the nation has been a source of comfort for the family, she said.
"We’re leaning on our family and our friends and on the Lord."
"We know that Emily died a happy girl. She was happy and fun. She died with some of her best friends."
Because of the close ties between Emily’s family and two other fire victims, Cale and Justin Anderson, the loss goes even deeper for the Yeltons.
"I feel like I’ve lost three children," Kim Yelton said, and her tears began to flow.

Emily Yelton.

Justin, Travis, and Emily, RIP.


The good news is that people survived this fire so that others may know what occured.

Tripp Wylie of the JL Mann Class Of 2006 survived the fire and lived to tell the tale on the The Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Early Show. I am so thankful Tripp survived this horrible disaster.

Here are both his stories from The Today Show and GreenvilleOnline.

House fire survivor remembers friends who perished

Tripp Wylie jumped from third floor into canal, but girlfriend did not follow

Sometime before 7 a.m. Sunday, the house erupted in flames. The five students sleeping on the first floor got out; of the eight students on the upper floor — three stories above the ground — only Wylie, a 20-year-old sophomore, survived.

He leaped out of his bedroom window into the canal more than 20 feet below. When he hit the water, he yelled repeatedly to his girlfriend, Pendley, urging her — begging her — to jump after him. She never did.
Wylie hadn’t wanted to go on television to talk about it, but didn’t want to dishonor his friends. Sunday night, he reached out in his own way to ask them what he should do.
“I kind of had a little prayer meeting with those seven people that were lost in the fire, and I just told them that I was gonna get word out of what they were like, how they impacted my life, people’s lives, tell how great people they really were,” he said.

His anguish was evident, the words coming slowly and painfully, one at a time and in brief clusters rather than in sentences.
“They were your best friends in the world,” Lauer observed.
“Exactly,” Wylie confirmed. “Exactly. Toughest thing I’ve ever dealt with, without a doubt.”
And then he talked of those people who had been at the center of his life and now were gone.
“Justin — Justin Anderson, his smile. Big, white teeth,” he began. “Big, huge smile you could pick out of a crowd. Personality that really — grab any stranger off the street, Justin could talk to anybody.”
Then there was Travis Cale. “Just the same, very engaging personality,” Wylie said. “These are my best friends. Travis — everything was a friendly competition between us. We’d get to each other, just messing with each other — [I’ll] definitely miss that.”
Emily Yelton had been his girlfriend, a pretty blonde with a big smile. “Just really the life of the party,” Wylie continued. “If you were out having a good time Friday, Saturday night, chances are Emily was there. Huge, huge heart. A very caring person. Loved life.”
Finally he spoke of Cassie Pendley, the young woman he had fallen for just a few months earlier
“We met the first day of classes, which was my birthday,” he recalled. “Me being stupid, walked into a class of about 400 people and just kind of yelled out, ‘Who wants to sit by me?’ and just happened to sit by her. The rest is history. Great girl. I keep telling people [it was] pretty amazing to walk into a room with her and watch all the heads turn to see who she was.”

The other three students who died in the tragedy were Lauren Mahon, Allison Walden and Will Rhea, whose brother, Andrew, escaped the flames. Most of the men were members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and the women were from Delta Delta Delta.
Ocean Isle Beach is a tight-knit community of just 500 residents, and the mayor there called the tragedy “the worst thing to ever happen here.”
Searching for the cause
Fire officials haven’t determined a cause for the fire, which quickly engulfed the house, leaving a gutted shell in its wake, but believe it was accidental and started on the deck that overlooks the canal.
Wylie has no idea what woke him early Sunday morning. In previous interviews, he said he just woke up, opened the door to his room, and saw a hall filled with smoke and the roar and crackle of fire. He realized he couldn’t get down the stairs and out that way, so he tore the blinds off the window and kicked it in.
He had no idea if anyone else was even in the house. “I called out hoping someone would hear," he told Lauer. "[I] didn’t have any idea at the time who was in, who was out, who was safe, who was not.”
He tore the blinds off the window and kicked the window out. “I could see flames at that point and could see how serious it really was,” he said.
Telling Pendley to follow him, he climbed on the window ledge, saw the flames shooting out of the back of the house, and leaped sideways, turning to land on his back in the water. He scraped the backs of his legs on a concrete retaining wall on the canal, but was otherwise physically uninjured.

“The only option you really had was just to jump out,” he said in a previous interview. “I couldn’t really breathe. I just had to make a quick decision.”
It saved Wylie’s life. Now he must figure out how to live it without the people who had shared it with him.
“I reach out to them,” he told Lauer. “I hope they know that I’m here for them. They’re in my prayers.”

By Jeanne Brooks
STAFF WRITER
jmbrooks@greenvillenews.com

Tripp Wylie doesn’t know what woke him up in the predawn Sunday at Ocean Isle Beach.
"I didn’t smell smoke," he recalled Monday afternoon. "I didn’t hear any alarm," not then anyway.
Wylie, 20, a Greenville native and a sophomore at the University of South Carolina, had gone with a group of friends to stay at a beach house owned by the family of one of them.
The trip, he said, "was really just kind of a last-minute thing. A friend had a house. It was available." Three cars left the Columbia campus late Friday and arrived at the house around 6 p.m. A fourth car came separately.
Thirteen students in all were in the house early Sunday morning, most from USC and at least one from Clemson University, when a consuming fire overswept it, killing seven.
Wylie remembers getting up and opening the door to his room on the top floor of the three level house. Then he smelled smoke. He looked down into the living room below. "I could see clear as day," he said, perhaps from street lights outside. He didn’t see flames.
Wylie went back into his room and closed his door. By then, "I could hear very clearly popping sounds, very loudly," he said. He knew he was hearing fire. But "I didn’t know how bad it was."
After looking out his window, Wylie opened the door a second time. Not 30 seconds had gone by, he estimated. But this time black smoke poured in fast and thick -- so thick, he said, it was like "you could almost grab it with your hand." It was hard to breathe. He realized he wouldn’t be able to get out through the house.
Wylie ripped the blinds off the window, opened it and kicked out the screen. He looked to his right and saw flames were about 20 feet away.
He couldn’t drop straight down. Under his window was what he guessed was 10-20 feet of concrete bank along a canal. "I had to jump out" and away from the house, Wylie said. "I had to jump out very far to make sure I didn’t hit the concrete."
A friend who was one of the house party had made it out and was standing below. "He was yelling, ‘Jump! You’ve got to jump!"
Wylie’s leap carried him into the water in the canal. His injuries were minor, mostly cuts but also small burns from hot cinders falling from the house.
When he looked up, the flames had already made their way almost to his window and the house was engulfed. There was no way to re-enter it.
Emergency responders took Wylie and the other survivors to the hospital. His father, Rick, was away on a mountain biking trip. His mother, Sydna, drove from Greenville to Ocean Isle Beach to bring him home.
Since then, Wylie said, he deals with the experience "minute by minute. It’s not something you can get your mind off of." But "it helps to have friends and family around."
Those at the beach house were all his friends, he said. "Some were my best friends." Some he’d known since first grade.
Sydna Wylie said the drive back to Greenville gave her five hours alone with her son that "I could just have him and love him and talk to him and listen to him."
She has thought since then, "Dear Lord, forgive me for taking (life) for granted."



Tripp Wylie On WYFF.

posted by Christian L.  # 8:23 PM