UPDATE: 7/5/13 – Sheriff Boyce talked about what may have happened to missing Chloie and Gage to News Channel 5. Boyce said the floor of the home collapsed in the blaze, sending the grandparents and possibly the children into the basement.
“They were in a pit. (It was) a fire pit at that point,” said Boyce.
It is possible the temperature got to 1,600 degrees which the temperature of heat used in a crematorium.
He also explained that the children’s bedroom was above a storage closet holding more than 30 propane tanks collected by the grandfather. The thought is that the emergency valves opened during the fire causing an explosion. The head would have been so intense that there was nothing left but ash.
“Does this type of thing stay with you? You bet. I think about it almost every day,” said Boyce, who said he hopes he’s wrong about the children dying in the fire. He said he will never stop looking for them.
UPDATE: 10/31/12 The State Fire Marshal’s Office has since released a statement that it has concluded “that there are no remains of the two children in the structure. The children’s location at this time is unknown.
Previous story:
Chloie Rhianna Leverette, 9, and Christopher “Gage” Daniel, 7, were initially thought lost in a fire in their Unionville, Tennessee home that took the lives of their grandparents, 72-year-old Leon “Bubba” McClaran and his wife, 70-year-old Molli McClaran, on Sept. 23, 2012. But, after a thorough investigation into the home, Chloie and Gage’s bodies were never found and now police believe they may have been abducted.
“The fact that we don’t have sufficient evidence from fire investigators right now to positively conclude that they died in this fire, makes us want to make sure that they are not somewhere else,” Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Kristin Helm told ABC.
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