Woman's car goes up in flames with everything she owned inside

HOUSTON (FOX 26) - First, it was the smell of plastic in her car.

“I didnt have a clue of what the plastic smell was. That never happened to me before. I thought my vehicle was in good running condition,” Natasha Taylor says.

Natasha says she looked around and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. She parked her 2004 Kia Sorrento at Kirby Drive near Norfolk and went into a meeting.

But when she returned, she says, “I noticed that it was orange windows all the way around and from that I, of course, panicked. And I opened up the door and my car was engulfed in flames.”

Six months ago, Natasha says she lost her job. With no income to pay rent, she and her 17-year-old daughter were living out of their car – using it as a storage space for their clothes and important documents while they "couch-surfed" between family and friends’ places.

“I had paperwork, birth certificates, social security cards for my daughter,” she says. “I was in hysterics, of course, because I felt like everything I owned went up in flames and it was very traumatic for me."

Quentin Richardson was leaving for his lunch break when he heard Natasha’s screams around the corner from his barbershop.

“You would hear different spontaneous combustion and just when I thought the big bang was coming, then here comes HFD around the corner,” Quentin says. 

Quentin says firefighters were able to extinguish the fire before it was too late.

Natasha was just about to start a new job Tuesday. Without a means of transportation and all of her essentials gone, she’s starting over from scratch.

Arson investigators are now trying to figure out what may have started the fire in the first place.