A judge told Savannah J. Hancock, before sentencing her on Tuesday, that she had already been given a second chance - when the five people inside the St. Albans home to which she set fire on Christmas Eve two years ago didn't die.
"You would be standing here on five murder charges - five felony murder [charges] for arson causing death - if something was different that night," Kanawha Circuit Judge Carrie Webster told Hancock, before sentencing her to spend five years in prison.
Hancock, 30, pleaded guilty in September to first-degree arson. She admitted that on Dec. 24, 2013, she started a fire at the Abney Street home where five people were sleeping, two adults and three children. Everyone made it out. The house, where Donna Collins, 62, lived all of her life, was a total loss.
To get revenge on Michelle Harvey, the girlfriend of Collins' son, Hancock set a cardboard box on fire on the porch of the house at about 1 a.m. Harvey had injected Hancock with root beer instead of Opana, Hancock said.
Collins and her three grandsons, then ages 14, 9 and 7, were inside the house, as was Harvey, the mother of the boys.
Collins said after the hearing Tuesday that smoke from the fire woke her oldest grandson, Michael, who then warned everyone to get out of the house. The batteries were dead in the smoke detector in the house, she said.
Webster read letters written by Donna and Michael Collins before sentencing Hancock. The letter written by Michael Collins described the sadness he felt standing outside while watching his family's Christmas tree through the window. But what he said bothered him most, was watching his grandmother cry.
Donna Collins wrote that her husband is now at her new home, but at the time of the fire he was in a nursing home. She wrote that if he hadn't been in the nursing home at the time, his health never would have allowed him to move quickly enough to escape the flames.
"'I've lost everything because of that woman,'" the judge said, reading Collins' letter. She asked that Webster give Hancock the maximum sentence.
The first-degree arson charge Hancock admitted to carries a possible 2- to 20-year sentence. Tom Price, Hancock's attorney, had asked the judge to sentence his client to two years of prison, but to suspend the prison sentence and let her serve the time on home confinement while attending a drug rehabilitation program.
As part of the deal Hancock made with prosecutors, assistant Kanawha prosecutor Monica Schwartz agreed to stand silent at sentencing and not advocate for a specific prison term.
Hancock said she was strung out on drugs the night she set the fire. She never intended to burn the house down, she told the judge.
"I just did it to scare her. It never dawned on me that cardboard - I mean I only flicked the lighter one time," she said. "As soon as I did it, I took off. I didn't find out until the next day" that the house had burned down.
"If I could do anything to take it back I would. I know there's nothing I can do now. ... If I would've hurt one of those children I would've ended my own life," she told the judge.
It wasn't until almost a year later, in November 2014, that Hancock was arrested and charged with the arson. Police received a tip from someone who said Hancock had bragged about setting the fire, said St. Albans police Lt. M.A. Gilbert.
"This was incredible police work," said Webster. "When I read this case and became familiar with it, I was amazed that this was solved, because there was not really any evidence that would have existed because what was used to burn the house, burned."
The judge said she would have considered a lesser sentence because Hancock doesn't have a criminal history, but noted she was recently kicked out of attending out-patient rehabilitation for smoking marijuana. Also, the judge said, a drug test given last month as part of the conditions of her bond showed signs of drug use.
Hancock spent about 10 days in jail last year before being released on bail. She arrived at the courthouse Tuesday with her mother, Roberta, who the judge allowed Hancock to hug before being taken into custody and to South Central Regional Jail.
"Due to your substance abuse history, I'm too worried about releasing you to self-report. I'm worried you'd do something regretful," Webster said. "I hope that this sends a message that there's got to be accountability in cases even where there's substance abuse addiction. ... For you to let drugs drive your life in the way they did, to where you felt you had to scare somebody because they gave you a shot of root beer instead of Opana, there's something wrong with that."
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.