It wasn’t until midnight when junior Megan Stephenson and her family got the call.

The fire started at 9:45 p.m. on Thursday, March 26 from a spontaneous combustion in the back of Stephenson’s family’s restaurant, Mariah’s Place.

The family showed up to the scene, but there wasn’t much they could do except watch. Stephenson held her crying mother Jen Hulett on her knees as they watched their restaurant burn before their eyes.

“It didn’t hit me until the next morning when I walked into the building,” Stephenson said. “…You walk in, and it looked like a warzone. Everything was destroyed. There was nothing left. … We put six months into [building] that café, and it was like something had been torn away from us.”

The broken windows and smashed in doors weren’t what Hulett envisioned when she named the restaurant in honor of her daughter Mariah.

Read more in Issue 8 of The Lance coming out Friday, May 1.