COVID-19 has impacted a lot of people financially. With many businesses closing or cutting back their staff, many people have found themselves out of a job and struggling to make ends meet. Some people have been faced with eviction and would be homeless if it weren’t for the generosity of others.

Reddit user aitathrowawayfire turned to Reddit to ask for some advice after she let her brother and his family move in with her. Her brother and her sister-in-law both lost their jobs due to the coronavirus and were evicted from their home. As a kind-hearted sister, she decided to let them and their two children (a 15-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl) move in with her temporarily.

She explained, “Four people is obviously a large addition, but I didn’t want them to be homeless and they assured me it’d be a temporary stay.”

All was well until one day when her nephew was in the bathroom and decided to try a TikTok challenge. She said her nephew told her that “there’s some kind of trend where you draw a shape on your mirror with hairspray and then you light it on fire, and it’s supposed to go out on it’s own without any damage.”

That’s right. Her nephew started a fire in her bathroom for a TikTok video, and it didn’t work out as he had expected. She wrote, “His fire spread onto a nearby stack of towels and got out of control. We all had to evacuate, but luckily I live relatively close to a firestation so the damage wasn’t that bad. My guest bathroom is scorched and will need repairs, but the rest of my home is okay.”

This Reddit user seems to think poor parenting is partly to blame for this incident. She wrote, “I think that my brother and SIL had to have been wildly negligible to allow this to happen, especially considering the lighter he used was my brother’s, meaning he must have taken it from him at some point.”

She says that she’s not going to ask her brother to pay for the repairs “because they flat out can’t afford it;” however, she doesn’t want them living in her home anymore. She explained, “I’m asking them to leave within the next week because I don’t want to risk something of this nature happening again.” She added, “I no longer feel safe living with them.”

Now, her brother is trying to talk her into letting his family stay. “They’ve apologized and asked me to reconsider because it was an accident, no one was hurt in the end, they’d be homeless if I kicked them out now, and to think of my niece who did nothing.”

To try to figure out whether or not to let her brother and his family continue to live in her home, she turned to Reddit to ask for advice, and the advice is a little bit mixed.

Some people feel that she is 100% right for wanting to evict her brother and his family because in her words, “I no longer feel safe living with them.”

One Reddit user wrote, “He lit your house on fire for an internet trend. He’s lucky he didn’t kill someone. Sounds like someone dangerous to have in the house.”

Another Reddit user pointed out, “You would have been homeless too if that fire burned down the house.”

Yet another comment reads, “He not only endangered everyone in the house he damaged it for a stupid trend. I would hope his parents had taught him that fire is not a toy , you don’t play with it. I would definitely put them out of my home and made them pay for the damages as well. It’s actually a good teaching experience for both parents and children play with fire and you get burned.”

However, other Reddit users think that it really was an accident and will most likely never happen again. “I understand that it’s very scary to think of what could have happened (my family recently suffered a bad house fire), but that wasn’t the kids intentions. To think of the stupid stuff I did at that age that could have killed me. It sounds like a genuine mistake and one that I’m sure he learned from. And to say the parents are negligible for not watching a 15 year old like a hawk is outrageous…But it does seem harsh to kick an entire family out with only a weeks notice for a stupid mistake a teenager made.”

Another Reddit user explained that it really depends on whether or not the teenager learned a lesson. “Do you think the kid learned their lesson and won’t do it again? Do you think they will do something stupid again? These are the questions you should be asking yourself, not strangers on the internet. If the answer is no, he didn’t learn, kick them out. If the answer is yes, I don’t think he will screw up again, let them stay.”

Do you think this Reddit user should kick out her family because of the fire in the bathroom? Do you think the teenager learned his lesson from this horrible mistake?