Inseparable in life and in death, it was a single, white casket that the boys shared on Friday, as the same anguished family and friends filled a Hill District church to mourn two lives cut short in a fire about which many questions remain.
Flames swept through the North Versailles apartment where KiDonn Pollard-Ford, 7, and KrisDon Pollard-Williams, 4, lived with their mother, Kiaira Pollard, whose sobs sounded above an organ's somber tune as her sons' casket closed and a pastor urged her to find strength in God.
"In times like these when we suffer so much, the normal question we ask is, 'If only God could have been there, why did this happen?' " the Rev. Kurtley Knight of Hillcrest Seventh-day Adventist Church told the tearful crowd. "Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does it seem like whenever we turn around the people we love die? Why two young boys, who had not even experienced any real life?"
As these questions haunted the mourners, Allegheny County police detectives sought to answer many of their own, namely why the brothers were home alone, hiding in their bedroom, during the June 30 fire. Police found KiDonn dead under a pile of clothes; KrisDon, who was unresponsive under a bed, died the next day.
Police gave the family room to grieve their losses on Friday, but Lt. Andrew Schurman of the homicide unit said detectives will soon file criminal charges in the boys' deaths.
"The person responsible for leaving them alone will be charged," he said, though he wouldn't elaborate. The cause of the early morning blaze also remains unknown, but the county's chief deputy fire marshal Don Brucker said Friday it likely started in the master bedroom, near an air-conditioning unit that investigators hope to examine next week.
But answers could not possibly ease the wave of sorrow that washed through the church, where the pastor recalled the boys as "perfect diamonds to their parents and grandparents."
Inquisitive older brother KiDonn -- "Smidget," to family friends -- earned straight A's at Green Valley Elementary School and was tapped to join a program for gifted students. He played Pee Wee football in school, but he was never adverse to sharing the game with little brother, KrisDon.
The younger boy, whose loved ones called him "Fatty," was fond of Power Rangers and brought joy to neighbors as he bounced around their apartment complex.
"They were beautiful babies," KrisDon's father, Christopher Williams, said. "They were best friends."
Grandmother Carmen Pollard said the boys were never apart.
"You take one," she said, "you've got to take the other."
Their closeness prompted funeral director Roland J. Coston-Criswell to grant the family's special request that they share a casket. It is his business to offer strength and comfort to the bereft, but he confided that the boys' services wore on him. Mr. Coston-Criswell also oversaw the funerals of several young children killed in a succession of house fires on Winslow Street in Larimer, but the brothers' case was most taxing: Their family are his friends.
"It's mentally very tough with children that age," he said after returning from the burial. "To actually see the bodies and hear the story, it's heart-wrenching."
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