Early Dog:  I pray you are not from Alaska.  One of the last things we need here is more ignorance and less compassion.  Had the mother gotten home one minute sooner it would simply have prolonged her agony as she found herself in the way of fire rescue workers.  If two minutes earlier maybe she could have fought her way into the flames where she too could have perished.  Perhaps she should have never left in the first place, shunning her job and all those responsibilities of being a good mom and parent.  There are a thousand 'perhaps' but at this point all of them are meaningless.  All we can do at this point is offer our prayers and condolences and remember that, there but for the grace of God go I.  Perhaps you are not old enough to understand what that means, but I lived through such an incident like this, that happened a half-hour later as we were all now up and ready for school and Mom and her 3 sons were able to run from the house fire and survive. I thank God for your luck.