Mourning Jessi Pierce: What the White Bear Lake Community Lost in One Overnight Fire

When the fire began, Jessi Pierce’s White Bear Lake neighbors were asleep. The smoke was blowing through the early morning air like a tornado by the time police woke her, resident Julie Andrus later told the Minnesota Star Tribune. She was still unsure of what she was seeing. She had no idea who was inside yet.

There was nothing left to save when White Bear Lake firefighters arrived and discovered a fully involved structure fire. Jessi Pierce, 37, was missing along with her three kids, Hudson, 8, Cayden, 6, and Avery, 4. The family dog was, too. Mike Hinrichs, Pierce’s spouse, was on business out of town. He discovered the fire from a distance, with no way to undo what had already occurred, which is how no one should ever learn about anything.

Since that Saturday morning on March 21, the White Bear Lake Fire Department and the Minnesota State Fire Marshal’s Office have been looking into the cause. They haven’t discovered any proof that the fire was started on purpose as of this writing. Investigators are looking at electrical wiring, gas lines, appliances, extension cords, candles, and ignitable liquids—the typical and laborious inventory of a fire scene that provides few quick answers—but the cause itself is still unknown. According to Fire Chief Greg Peterson, the department is devoting all of its resources to the investigation, and the community will be informed when the results are verified. The person who arrived first and caused the most pain is currently the only thing that is certain.

The defeat was immediately and loudly felt throughout the hockey community. For ten seasons, Pierce had contributed to NHL.com, covering the Minnesota Wild, her hometown, with the kind of institutional knowledge that only comes from true love for a beat. According to all of her coworkers’ accounts, she was the kind of press box presence that makes a building feel different when she’s there. She would frequently be wrapped in a blanket against the arena cold at Grand Casino Arena, asking everyone she saw how they were and whether they had spoken to her three years ago or that morning. After a Sunday game, Nashville Predators coach Andrew Brunette said he had known her for a long time and enjoyed seeing her each time his team visited Minnesota. “It’s a sad day in hockey,” he uttered. The night following the fire, during a Wild game against Dallas that the team had to play anyhow, many tears were shed at the arena, according to Michael Russo of The Athletic. He stated that the press box would not be the same.

It’s difficult to ignore how her ability to genuinely make people feel seen in a professional setting that doesn’t always reward that kind of warmth keeps coming up in her colleagues’ tributes. Kristin Krull, her co-host on the Bardown Beauties podcast, publicly envied Jessi’s self-assurance and conversational style on social media. Krull wrote, “She was like another big sister to me,” describing a friendship based on Monday recording sessions, which had become a regular part of her week. Krull wrote that she hadn’t yet been able to return to her desk with her microphone when the podcast notification—an automated reminder that the weekly recording was approaching—appeared on her phone on the Monday following the fire. “The world keeps moving even when we feel like we can’t.”

On March 29, the public visitation at Mueller Memorial Funeral Home in White Bear Lake attracted locals who had never met Jessi Pierce in person but felt they knew something genuine about her because they had read her writings or followed her on social media for years. The memorial pages for each of the four victims depict the unique textures of four distinct individuals: Avery, who was four years old and already described as a princess who loved dancing and pretty dresses; Hudson, who was inquisitive and enjoyed exploring; and Cayden, the humorous one who worked hard to make people laugh. And Jessi herself, who is remembered as a mother who valued creating memories above nearly everything else, would occasionally show up at Wild practices with one of her kids on her hip, refusing to treat work and family as untouchable compartments.

Pierce told people openly and without shame that she had wanted to write for the NHL since she was eighteen. Before the Minnesota Wild beat became something genuine and enduring, the route took her through smaller publications, a hockey blog she started on her own, Brainerd, Minnesota, Syracuse, New York, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. She received her education at Iowa State. She persisted because of her determination. She joined NHL.com ten years ago and remained there, establishing a reputation that affected the entire sport in ways that most local beat writers are never able to.

The inquiry is still ongoing. The community has mostly complied with the White Bear Lake Fire Department’s request for patience while its team examines the evidence, despite the fact that grief doesn’t wait for answers. In the days following the fire, a grief concert in White Bear Lake brought people together in a way that communities occasionally naturally do when the loss is too great for individual grieving. Nicole Amor, a U.S. Army Reserve soldier killed in operations in Iran, was among the other recent deaths in the town. White Bear Lake was bearing the burden of collective grief into spring without having requested it.

It’s unclear what the investigation will ultimately uncover and when. The shape of what’s missing is already known; it includes a press box in Minnesota, a podcast recording schedule, a home where a father returned home to nothing, and a community that is still, in all honesty, trying to come to terms with the fact that this even happened.