The last morning Jourdan Feasby saw all three of her children alive was cold and bright, Thanksgiving morning in Wisconsin, the kind where the air smells like woodsmoke and winter promises. She remembers how Rylee, 10, kept tugging on her sleeve to show her a drawing he’d made. How 9-year-old Connor laughed at his sister’s mismatched socks. How 7-year-old Alena insisted she wasn’t cold, even as she burrowed into her mother’s coat.
She dropped them off at their father’s apartment later that day, the kids waving from the porch, their silhouettes framed in the doorway. It was ordinary. Safe. The kind of drop-off a parent does a thousand times without thinking.
Hours later, her phone rang, the kind of call that splits a life into Before and After.
According to the police report, Joshua Kannin told officers he woke up to a world that didn’t look right, the air thick, his eyes cloudy, the kind of disorientation that comes before fear fully blooms. When he stepped downstairs, he saw what he described as a little fire licking across the kitchen floor.
He told them he panicked.
He told them he walked straight out the front door, thinking, I have to get help.
Neighbors later recalled hearing him pounding on their door, screaming. Come downstairs, he yelled into the night, calling out to the children still inside.
He said that when he tried to go back in, smoke swallowed him whole. I barely got two steps in, he told police. When I opened the door, it made it even worse.
Sometime earlier, he’d smoked a cigarette in the kitchen. He believed he’d put it out.
Jourdan arrived at the hospital in a blur, the kind of frantic, stumbling hurry only mothers know. Rylee and Connor were already gone when first responders pulled them from the apartment. Alena was still alive. Burned, fighting, small.
Jourdan sat beside her daughter’s fragile body, stroking her hand even as machines hummed. Somewhere in that cruel fluorescent quiet, she turned to Joshua.
You wouldn’t grab the kids first? she asked.
She remembers the stillness after she said it. The way the silence felt heavier than the machines.
Things weren’t adding up, she later said.
Alena passed not long after.
Investigators combed through the scene, the charred remains of a two-story apartment that still smelled like soot days later. They recovered Joshua’s phone and drafted a search warrant. Because of state law, the document spelled out possible charges, arson and homicide, words that cut through a grieving mother like glass.
But after searching the phone, police found no evidence of wrongdoing. No messages. No plans. No signs of intent.
We remain committed to a thorough, impartial, evidence-driven investigation, a police spokesman told the press. It was a sentence built to hold a place for answers that may take months to come.
On Friday, the town gathered to say goodbye to the three siblings. Three small caskets, three photographs lit by soft candlelight. Jourdan stood before family, friends, and strangers who had come to hold her up in the only way a community can. She spoke about the way Rylee mothered everyone around her, the way Connor never left the house without some wild invention in his pocket, the way Alena skipped instead of walked, always in a hurry to reach joy.
Joshua attended the service too. He stayed near the back. He didn’t speak.
Outside, the November air bit at everyone’s cheeks, the sky the color of steel. A GoFundMe helped cover the funeral costs. People hugged without saying the right words, because there are no right words.
Jourdan’s world is quieter now. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that echoes.
But she still hears their voices sometimes, Rylee humming in the bathroom, Connor narrating his imaginary adventures, Alena giggling at something only she found funny. The memories come like soft footsteps, like little hands tugging her awake.
She holds onto them, each one a glowing ember she refuses to let die.
Because in the end, what remains is love, fierce, unfinished, and still hers.
