Family Will Leave County After Fire Guts AIDS Brothers’ Home

A mother whose three sons have been exposed to the AIDS virus said Saturday that the boys would be withdrawn from school and the family would leave DeSoto County after a suspicious fire gutted their home.

“I will not go back,” Louise Ray said Saturday in a telephone interview from her attorney’s office in Sarasota. “The kids are not going back to school there because next time I might not be so lucky and my kids cannot be replaced. I never thought it would go this far.”

The fire Friday night that destroyed their wood-frame home capped a week of bomb and death threats and a boycott of the elementary school where the boys returned last week to their classes.

Officials are investigating the cause of the fire.

“All we have are the clothes we have on,” Ray said. “I don’t know where we’ll go or what we’ll do. We’ll go into seclusion for a few days. The only thing I do know is that we will not move back into DeSoto County.”

Ray, her husband, Clifford, and their children--Ricky, 10, Robert, 9, Randy, 8, and Candy, 6--were not home when the fire erupted.

The fire, which erupted in the utility room, was not started by a firebomb, Armond Summerall, DeSoto public safety director, said Saturday. However, he said: “We’re not ruling out anything. We’re looking at arson; we’re looking at accidental.”

The Ray boys were barred from Memorial Elementary last fall after they tested positive for antibodies to the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome. They are hemophiliacs and are believed to have been exposed to AIDS through a blood factor they take to make their blood clot if they are injured. They show no symptoms of the deadly disease.

A federal judge ordered the boys reinstated in school, prompting protests from parents and a boycott when classes began Monday.