As he spoke on the sidewalk outside the house, Herndon took calls on his cell phone about plans for the children's funeral, which is to take place at 11 a.m. tomorrow at City Temple of Baltimore.
"They were always together," he said. "You couldn't separate them. They play together, they go to school together, they're computer-literate together."
The older child, Elijah, who attended Garrison Middle School, was particularly protective of his younger siblings and "wouldn't go 10 feet without knowing where they were," Herndon said. "It wasn't three children - it was always a unit of one."
He said the children had been very much involved in helping their father fix up the house, which was in the process of being renovated when it burned. Each child, Herndon said, had specific ideas for the decor of his or her room - and made them known.
Herndon, who trained as an emergency medical technician, used the occasion of meeting a reporter to thank city firefighters for trying to save the children, even if they were not successful.
On Saturday, Steven Davis, a neighbor of the Fields', told The Sun that he had run over to their house when he saw smoke billowing from it and found the front and side doors locked. "I heard the older boy yelling, `Help me, help me,' " said Davis, who later watched as the children were taken from the building. The cause of the fire has not been determined, said Kevin Cartwright, a spokesman for the city Fire Department.
At Hilton Elementary, which has 273 students, Principal Sonya Goodwyn-Askew received a group of grief counselors, sent over by the school district, in the brightly lit front office, where yellow walls are decorated with plaques celebrating the students' academic progress.
"We're very conscious of the fact that children grieve differently from adults," Goodwyn-Askew said during a break. "Some students are aware of what happened; some are not. Everyone is quiet, so we're not sure what they're thinking. Adults are more expressive, so some of them are having a hard time."
The younger Fields children's two teachers in particular "are having a difficult time holding it together," Goodwyn-Askew said. "They see them every day, five days a week."
The principal described both children as "excellent students" who always behaved well. When she became principal at the beginning of the school year in September, Goodwyn-Askew said, she addressed a small group of pupils as a way of getting to know them.
