On 2 May 2013 an arson fire started in the stairwell of an apartment in Schenectady, New York. David Terry died there with three of his children: Layah, 3; Michael, 2; and Donovan, 11 months. His five-year-old daughter Safyre lived because he held her against him. She was burned over about 75 percent of her body. She later lost her right hand and left foot. She spent years in reconstruction. Her aunt Liz Dolder became her guardian.

In December 2015 Safyre was eight. Dolder bought a $4 metal card tree at Goodwill. The girl said she wanted it full. A Facebook post went around the world. The smallest post office in town took deliveries measured in tens of thousands a day. Contemporary reports put the December haul above 300,000 pieces; later retellings speak of a million. Crowdfunding for medical bills jumped. Disney came later. Snopes checked the appeal and called it genuine.

The family used the surplus to send toys and goods to other children in hospitals and shelters — a foundation built from mail that had been meant for one tree. That is the documented arc: a father who used his body as a shield, a child who asked for paper, and a public that answered louder than anyone in that apartment could have planned.

The scars are the fire. The cards are what strangers did with the story. Neither erases the other.

Sources: ABC News, BBC Trending, TODAY, The Independent and Firehouse coverage of the 2015 card campaign; Snopes fact-check (true); contemporaneous accounts of the 2 May 2013 Schenectady arson and David Terry’s death with three of Safyre’s siblings. Mail totals follow 2015 postal reporting (300,000-plus that December); later “million” figures are not independently itemized in those first dispatches.