HUNTLEY – A simple Facebook message from a heartbroken friend of one of the tenants who lost almost everything three weeks ago in a deadly fire at Huntley’s Woodcreek Apartments has snowballed into a communitywide effort.

Penny Andersen, a Huntley resident, took to the popular social media website to ask her friends for donations – food, clothes, money – to help her longtime friend who had her personal possessions destroyed in a two-alarm blaze in a six-unit Woodcreek apartment building at 11700 Woodcreek Ave.

The fire killed Allen R. Jacobs, a 47-year-old Huntley man who was bound to a wheelchair and couldn’t escape the fire that originated in his first-floor unit.