LITTLE AXE, Okla. (KFOR) – It’s a tough time for high school seniors.
Graduations and celebrations are on hold, and times got even tougher for one teen in Little Axe.
His truck burst into flames, and now Alex Jackson has only a charred skeleton of his old truck.
“It just really hurts,” said Alex.
It was a fixer upper, a project he’d been working hard on during this quarantine.
“I swapped the motor out I put a different motor in it, I did a little bit of rear end work,” said Alex.
Now all of it is gone.
“About 5:30 (a.m.), I hear and explosion and a ‘woosh’ so I knew there was fire,” said Jacquie Jackson, Alex’s grandma.
The family woke up to the flames ripping apart Alex’s truck Saturday morning.
“They got really big and came out and my fear was they would get the other cars or the tree,” said Jacquie.
Alex’s hard work burning right in front of him.
“It really hurt to just watch it burn until the fire department got here,” he said.
Jacquie was the first one to the truck.
“At that point, we didn’t even know what was happening, we just knew there was a fire and it was scary,” she said.
The truck was a 2001 Ford F150, which has multiple recalls.
Since Alex spent most of his first weeks fixing up the engine, he was planning to take it to the dealership the day it caught fire.
“It just decided to go before I could do that,” he said.
The fire department told the family they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint how the fire started, but Alex thinks it could have been a problem with the brake master cycle.
“We’re fairly certain that it was something with a recall, but we’ll never know,” said Jacquie.
Inside the truck, his cap and gown, dress shirt and tie, diploma cover and senior yard signs for his cousin and himself.
All of that now destroyed.
Alex had been up at the school the day before, filming for a virtual graduation.
“There’s so much anxiety and stress and then there’s this to add on top of it,” said Jacquie.
The Jackson family just glad Alex wasn’t behind the wheel.
“I’m so happy that the boys weren’t in it when this happened, I mean we were so fortunate God was definitely with us to make sure that it didn’t spread,” said Jacquie.
Alex is also graduating from Mid America Tech and plans to get a job as a mechanic.
If you’d like to help Alex, there is a GoFundMe set up here.
