More Victims Of The Economy

A series of bureaucratic glitches and ignoring safety warnings has led to the death of a Detroit family facing bankruptcy.

Falling behind in your bills can be deadly, as the tragic story of a Detroit family shows.

A 46-year-old father and this three children are dead from carbon monoxide poisoning after their local energy company cut off their power, prompting the family to use a generator that poisoned them with carbon monoxide.

And the family’s power company says a bureaucratic “glitch” caused them to shut the power off when it shouldn’t have been.

Vaughn Reed, 46, and his three children, Markeisha, 17, DeMarco, 12, and DeMarte, six, died in the early morning hours of Friday when carbon monoxide from a generator in the basement of the family’s two-story home on Detroit’s west side.

They had put the gas-powered generator into use when power supplier DTE Energy cut power to the house in late June, one day after Reed filed for bankruptcy.

On Thursday night, the family had sealed all the windows to run the air conditioning, the Detroit Free Press reports. By the time the house began to fill with carbon monoxide at around 3 a.m., it was too late.

Spokespeople for DTE say the company had been notified of the bankruptcy filing, which would have prompted them to restore power. But the address listed with the bankruptcy notification was incorrect — it was Reed’s mother’s address — so power was not restored to the proper house, DTE says.

“The address is the primary component used in that process,” Eileen Dixon, a spokeswoman for DTE, told the Detroit News. “This just underscores how important it is that people let us know when [they] are in trouble.”

Pretty tragic all the way around, frankly. Difficult to assign blame here, the power company screwed up for sure, but running a generator with no way to vent the carbon monoxide in a sealed home is, well, quite a deadly mistake. If even one event in the chain that led to this tragedy was broken, the Reed family would probably still be alive today.

Could DTE have checked with the Reeds before shutting off power? Could Vaughn Reed have paid way more attention to safety warnings on the generator? Could the Reeds have a bought a working carbon monoxide detector in the home? Could DTE have checked the right address and accepted the bankruptcy notification anyway?

Who knows? Sadly, it's too late for the Reed family, anyway. When I talk about the economic crisis, foreclosures, bank bailouts, bankrupt families and government services in dry, technical term with numbers and charts and explanations, you have to keep in mind that behind all this is a human cost to be paid as well, emotional, social, mental, and in some cases, a physical toll.

Sometimes that human cost is very, very high.