BERNE — Rick Coons said the community is doing an outstanding job of coming together to take care of his younger daughter’s basic needs. But he worries about her psyche; he wants her to be free of guilt.

A fire Sunday burned the Cobleskill house where she lived with her mother and grandmother. Fire investigators suspect the blaze started by unattended candles, Rick Coons said. But, he said, he thinks it may have been started by old wiring.

The day before the fire, on Saturday morning, Chelsea Coons wanted to celebrate her 17th birthday by having breakfast at an Albany diner with her family.
On Wednesday, Rick Coons said, his daughter had read an account of the fire in the media "that made her hysterical."

After the fire, Chelsea Coons and her mother were housed by the American Red Cross at the Best Western Motel in Cobleskill, he said.

The fire started in a room of the house that Chelsea was decorating downstairs from her own room, he said, so that she could be closer to her grandmother, Madelyn Wright. His daughter, he said, was giving up her young life to care for her grandmother, who had cancer. She had brought a refrigerator to the spare room as well as a Christmas tree and Christmas lights.

For years, Chelsea Coons and her mother, JoAnne Coons, who is divorced from Rick Coons, had cared for Wright. Wright, who was 78, succumbed to the burns that covered most of her body and died Monday morning, Rick Coons said.

He lives in Berne and works as a mechanic in a shop he owns, Quality Auto Service in Rotterdam.
While describing the circumstances around and leading up to the fire, Rick Coons was at times beside himself, crying. At other times, he was optimistic, saying, "We can’t change the past. We have to move on."

And he was also uncertain, searching for answers for how the fire started and questioning the initial investigation and wondering whether he wants another investigation or if he wants to know the truth.
While, over the course of his life, he has lost many friends and family members, he said, "This hit me harder than anything I’ve ever dealt with. I just can’t make any sense of it."

Chelsea started her schooling in the Knox nursing school. She is currently in her final year of high school at Cobleskill-Richmondville High School. She has been considering colleges, such as the state schools at Potsdam and New Paltz, and wants to pursue a degree in either music or nutrition, her father said. She plays the viola and the electric and acoustic guitars and is a gifted musician, he said.

Rick Coons described his daughter as selfless and not materialistic.
"There’s a good chance her grandmother wasn’t going to make it much longer," he said, adding that if Wright had died after his daughter had gone away to college, it would have been easier for her.
Chelsea, he said, had begun caring for her grandmother as her condition worsened about three years ago when Chelsea was "at a point where she can have a social life."
"She has an excellent work ethic," he said of his daughter, who works at a Cobleskill diner.

"Kicked in the teeth"

Chelsea Coons lost pets and new running shoes in the fire, her father said.
"She lost a lot," he said, "but she didn’t lose everything."

The family is awaiting insurance money, and Chelsea Coons and her mother plan to live in an apartment building in Cobleskill.

Beyond the fire loss, the next day Chelsea suffered what otherwise would have seemed a minor theft.
The morning after the fire, after her grandmother had died, Chelsea Coons hadn’t slept, and, her father said, she was "a little disoriented" and "absent-minded because she hadn’t slept."

She went shopping at a supermarket. At the check-out counter, she discovered she didn’t have her purse; she checked in the bathroom, in her car, and watched the store’s surveillance cameras, Rick Coons said. The cameras showed she didn’t have the purse with her as she entered the store, and, he said, he thinks she left it on her seat in the car and someone stole it. There was between $300 and $400 in her purse, as well as a cell phone, her debit and library cards, and her driver’s license, he said.
Rick Coons called the incident, "another kick in the teeth."
"She was so tired," he said.

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This week, Brian Brusgul, a friend of the Coons family, established a trust fund in Chelsea Coons’s name. Donations may be made at any Trustco Bank branch, Brusgul said, where donors need only mention the Chelsea Coons benefit fund.