Cesar Diaz says he struggles to get out of bed some days after he lost his sister Melanie Diaz in a fire in a downtown Silver Spring high-rise apartment complex one year ago. “I just wished that it was me instead of her that was gone from this world,” Diaz told members of the Maryland General Assembly House Environment and Transportation Committee during a hearing Tuesday in Annapolis as his parents looked on, crying. “[We want] to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anybody else and that nobody else has to go home and have an empty chair and empty room and empty bed because somebody in their family is no longer here.”
