At 9am on Thursday morning, the National Civil Rights Museum on Mulberry Street was just opening its doors. Based around what had probably been Memphis’s most infamous building, the Lorraine Motel, the Museum documented the progress of the Civil Rights movement in obtaining equality for all races in the United States, and commemorated the leader of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated with a rifle bullet on a balcony of the motel on April 4, more than fifty years earlier.
That morning, there was nobody waiting to pay their sixteen dollars for admission, though the Museum did have four school groups from other parts of Tennessee scheduled to visit later in the day.
Their visits would be cancelled.
As the security guard unlocked the main entrance doors that morning, he noticed a small blonde girl, standing about a hundred feet up the street, dressed in a white t-shirt and blue jeans, holding a WalMart bag in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. The guard would say afterward that he thought it unusual that she should be standing there, seemingly just watching the museum, but making no attempt to come over once it opened. Especially on a day when she should have been in school. She hadn’t seemed in any distress, so he’d figured it was no concern of his, and he went back inside.
If he’d stayed outside, he would have seen the young girl open the WalMart bag, toss in her mobile phone, take out the sixty-four ounce bottle of barbecue lighter fluid, and undo the child-resistant cap. She’d taken it from her father’s garage, and it was only two-thirds full, but that would be plenty. She lifted the bottle above her head, and poured the liquid all over her hair, then down onto her t-shirt. Finally she brought it down to waist-level, and soaked her jeans. The pungent fumes stung her eyes and nose, but she didn’t blink or cough. She put the empty bottle back into the bag, and took out from it one of her mother’s disposable cigarette lighters.
She walked towards the museum.
She was just inside the door, when the security guard noticed the stench and fumes from the lighter fluid and started to walk over, but he was still ten feet away when she clicked the lighter and erupted into a ball of flames. The guard took one horrified look, and sprinted away, racing back in under thirty seconds with the fire blanket he’d pulled from the wall, frantically tearing it open. He held it in front of him, used it to push the girl to the ground and tried desperately to wrap her in it to smother the flames, all the time shouting for more help.
The paramedics arrived inside five minutes. Security guard Jefferson Wood was taken to hospital with multiple second-degree burns, and took weeks to recover.
Kaitlyn Isabella Jones, aged eleven, was pronounced dead at the scene. The coroner would later return a verdict of suicide.
Nobody paid any attention to Dudák who stood by the side wall of the museum and fed, eyes closed and smiling with pleasure.