KEY POINTS:
The mother of a 6-year-old killed in a house fire yesterday searched the burning house until the last possible minute for the autistic boy she believed was hiding from the flames.
Brandon Pawson, 6, was later found dead by a door in the lounge where the fire started about 4am.
His distraught mother, Sharon, escaped the blaze, leaping for safety from Brandon's bedroom after a final search. Her other children, daughter Kelly, 15, and son Tim, 18, escaped, as did a friend.
"It's just such a waste," his aunt Natasha Sandbrooks sobbed, as she watched police carry her nephew's body from the Shirwell St, Feilding, house yesterday afternoon.
"That was his room," she said, pointing. "Sharon had gone back in there when she couldn't find him, thinking he might be hiding.
"He was just so affectionate, he was always on my knee giving me cuddles."
"You know they say autistics have trouble processing information," said her husband, Kevin, "but Brandon was the smartest autistic kid you could ever meet. It was amazing how much he knew.
"He wasn't one of those quiet, shy kids. He was mischievous."
The pair said Brandon and their 5-year-old daughter, Hannah, were the best of mates.
Though they had told her about the fire and about Brandon, she didn't really understand, Natasha said.
"I don't think it's really sunk in yet."
Brandon had, Natasha said, "come such a long, long way. There were so many things he was doing that people thought he would never do - spelling, reading."
Up until recently, she and Kevin had cared for Brandon one day a week to give his mum some quiet time.
Across the road, Donna Dais held her 5-month-old baby close. It was Dais who first heard the screaming and, thinking someone was being beaten up, went outside to investigate.
"I didn't really think about what I'd do if it was someone being beaten, but I heard all this yelling and breaking glass and thought somebody must have been getting a hell of a hiding."
She found Sharon, "absolutely beside herself" and screaming hysterically, as flames engulfed the house.
Meanwhile Dais' partner, Danny Higgison, had grabbed a hose and was scrambling madly around the Pawsons' garden, trying to find a tap.
"He stuck it through that window," Dais said, pointing to Brandon's room. Higgison didn't know Brandon was still in the house at the time, she said. "If he had, he would have been stuffed. If he had known, he would have gone in there."
Sharon and her two youngest children had moved into the rented house only in the past few weeks.
A next-door neighbour, who did not want to be named, was the first on the scene and watched helplessly as the fire quickly engulfed the small house. He said the flames reached up to 5m high. "There wasn't much we could do by the time we got out there, you couldn't get into the house.
"The mum was screaming that her kid was in the house."
The blaze was so hot that a security guard trying to break into the house was driven back. "But by that time it was an inferno. The mum was terrified, howling, just screaming that her kid was inside."
The neighbour said the fire was so fast that the flames were nearly extinguished by the time the fire crews arrived, immediately donning breathing apparatus to combat the thick smoke and find the boy.
Finding Brandon in the three-bedroom home was the firefighters' only priority, said Feilding's deputy fire chief Graeme Spiers.
"We had to see if he was still alive and able to be saved, we searched the bedrooms, bathroom and laundry area." Spiers says firefighters eventually found the boy's body in the lounge.
The blaze started in the lounge in the back of the home, and the Herald on Sunday has learned it could have been sparked by an electrical fire from the television plugged into the wall.
Brandon was one of 500 pupils at Lytton St School in Feilding, a school no stranger to coping with tragedy.
A fellow pupil Kevin Liengme, 10, was the only survivor of a cliff collapse that killed his brother Michael and two family friends Callum and Keryn Langley at Pohangina River last December.
Principal Geoff Lovegrove said staff gathered to support Brandon's teacher yesterday morning, sharing stories about the little boy. As a special needs student, Brandon was given a lot of teaching support and staff had noticed many areas of improvement recently, Lovegrove said.
