ABILENE, TX – At 3:00 Sunday morning, reports of smoke and flames on the 4200 block of Caldwell road in North Abilene reached the Abilene Fire Department.
Residents gathered on either side of the lawn praying that their neighbor Michael Czeto was not inside.
After almost four and a half hours of fighting, the first responders retrieved Czeto’s body from the ashes and informed his friends that he had indeed died.
Due to the intensity of the flames and the vulnerability of the structure, firefighters were unable to enter to fight the fire from within or rescue anyone who might have been trapped.
Czeto’s next-door neighbor and friend of 12 years Steve Price says he heard a knock on his door at 4 a.m. only to step out and see the massive flames coming from his friend’s house, a house he himself used to live in.
“I knew he was there because his van was there, we tried to call and call and call and no answer. We was hoping that he was someplace else.” said Price, a sentiment shared by many who knew Czeto.
Neighbors described him as a carpenter, a father, a role model, and an all around good guy.
One of the responders that night was Abilene Fire Marshall Jeremy Williams. He is the man that knocked on Price’s door to inform him of his friends passing.
“This is always the difficult part of the job, whenever you have to deal with a fatality and letting the family know. You yourself are emotional and you know they’re going to be emotional…Telling someone they’ve lost a loved one is extremely difficult.”
The cause of the fire is still undetermined. Marshall Williams says that due to the immense amount of damage it will be difficult to determine one at all, but they will continue to search to give Czeto’s friends and family some sense of closure.
