Fatal Fire Lawsuit Heads To Trial

Clarice Elarabi woke up at 3:12 a.m. feeling ​“just so hot. Like, on fire.” 

She stuck her head out of the window. She took a cold shower. She tried and failed to go back to sleep. ​“I was so hot,” she said, ​“I didn’t know what was going on with me.”

Two hours later, Elarabi learned that her twin brother’s house in the Hill had erupted into flames.

The blaze took his life. It hurled her into life-altering grief. And Elarabi is now preparing to argue in court that the City of New Haven could have prevented it.

Elarabi, 49, is one of five people suing both the city and former West Street landlord John Farrar over unsafe conditions at 150 West St., which caught fire in the early morning of May 5, 2019.

The three-story house was supposed to be a two-family home, according to city records. In reality, Farrar and previous landlord Dorjan Dashari were operating an illegal rooming house, renting out individual bedrooms to 16 tenants.

Those tenants included Elarabi’s twin, Michael Randall, and Corey Reed, who both died in the fire.

The lawsuit, first filed in April 2021, is slated to go to trial next week, starting with jury selection on Tuesday.

Elarabi and her co-plaintiffs are arguing that Livable City Initiative (LCI) complaints and inspections show that the city knew about the illegal rooming house, and about the hazardous conditions — such as a lack of working smoke alarms — that left two people trapped in the fire and prompted some tenants to jump out of windows for their lives. 

The building’s landlords had also not secured a mandatory landlord license with the city, which would have prompted regular housing code inspections.

“Everything could have been prevented,” said Elarabi. ​“The city of New Haven needs to be accountable.” 

The city, meanwhile, has filed a cross complaint arguing that Farrar, as the landlord, should be held exclusively responsible. City attorneys wrote that the city ​“did not know of John Farrar’s negligence, had no reason to anticipate such negligence, and reasonably relied upon John Farrar not to be negligent as stated.”

Mayor Justin Elicker wrote in a statement that ​“while the fire predates my time as mayor, what happened to Mr. Randall is a tragedy, and I was grateful for the opportunity to speak with his sister and to convey my condolences for her family’s loss.” 

“Given the pending trial, I can’t comment on the specifics of the case,” Elicker wrote. ​“However, the City always participates in the legal process in good faith, and ensuring affordable, safe, high-quality housing has been and will continue to be a top priority for my administration.”

In legal documents, John Farrar denied many of the allegations against him. His lawyers wrote, that the ​“Defendant admits that at the time of the fire he owned and controlled the premises, however, he only purchased the property less than two months before the fire from the prior owner.”

He could not be reached for comment and has declined to speak with the Independent in the past.

Searching For Michael

Randall spent the last minutes of his life knocking on his neighbors’ doors to let them know that the building was in flames.

One couple managed to escape after Randall alerted them. In the absence of a working smoke detector, Randall had served as their fire alarm. 

Elarabi, meanwhile, was overheating in her Windsor home. She learned about the fire two hours after she had first woken up, by way of a phone call from her sister. 

“My first thought was, I know Michael,” Elarabi recalled. Her brother was strong and healthy, she thought. ​“He’s fine.”

Elarabi called him. She called and called, but no one answered.

Randall had been living in the West Street house for about six months, in one of four bedrooms carved out of the house’s small attic. He had planned to move out soon, according to Elarabi, with an upcoming lease for a new apartment starting in June.

Randall, an avid chef who cooked for local restaurants, would prepare food for all of the second and third floor tenants in their shared kitchen — even the ones who seemed to be constantly arguing, Elarabi recalled. She said he could make anything — Italian food, soul food, Spanish food — and the house would fill up with mouth-watering smells.

She remembers the 150 West St. building’s ​“very narrow” stairs, which ​“swerved” at the top in a way that made her scared to go up. She remembers his bedroom window being ​“the size of a window in the bathroom” — not big enough for a man like Randall to fit through in an emergency. 

She remembers the night he called her about an alleged altercation with the landlord, Farrar, who had purchased the property in March 2019 for $155,000. (City land records show that, in November 2023, Farrar sold 150 West for $145,000 to a holding company controlled by Eliezer Rooz of Brooklyn.) 

Three days before the 2019 fatal fire, Randall told police that Farrar arrived at the house unannounced and began questioning him about his cousin, who was there as a guest, insinuating that his cousin shouldn’t have been in the house if he was not paying rent. Farrar disputed this story to police, who arrested him for third degree assault among other charges; he pleaded no contest to the charges.

Though Elarabi was concerned about Randall’s living situation, she knew that he planned for it to be temporary. ​“He only used it really to sleep.”

Most tenants were sleeping on the morning of May 5, 2019, when the house caught fire. Randall and Reed both died that day of smoke inhalation and thermal injuries, according to a state medical examiner.

When Randall didn’t answer her many calls, Elarabi drove out to 150 West St., where firefighters were working to quell the blaze. No one at the scene could tell her anything about her brother. 

Elarabi drove around the neighborhood, looking for Randall. She figured maybe he’d been injured. She checked the hospital, where no one had information about his whereabouts. ​“I started calling him, calling him, calling him, calling him, calling him,” she said. ​“He wasn’t answering.”

She returned to West Street. ​“There were still fire trucks. There was an ambulance.” She asked and asked, Have you seen my brother?

Finally, someone from the fire department approached her. ​“He wanted me to come and identify a body,” Elarabi said. ​“I wasn’t thinking it was Michael.” 

“I went to the van,” she recalled. ​“I looked inside. And it was Michael, and that’s when my life shattered.”

"When He Left, Half Of Me Left"

As kids, Elarabi and Randall would ​“ice skate” in ordinary shoes, gliding across the frozen puddles in Wintergreen Cemetery.

They grew up in the Hill on Sylvan Avenue. Randall attended Hillhouse High School, where he specialized in culinary arts. He would later cook at Eli’s on Whitney Avenue, The Colony at Yale, and in his own kitchen for both catering side gigs and family meals.

He loved to feed people. Elarabi and her daughter Brianna loved his quiche pies, fried chicken, collard greens, Spanish rice, pulled pork, and mac and cheese.

Every year, Randall would help Elarabi and her kids plant flowers in their garden. ​“My garden doesn’t look like a garden anymore,” Elarabi said.

Randall was the kind of person to whom no one was really a stranger. A parishioner at Trinity Church on the Green, he would supply toothbrushes and blankets to the people who slept outside nearby. According to Elarabi, he once moved to Dublin, Georgia, for about seven months to take care of a woman he’d met in a grocery store. 

He could also be brutally honest. Elarabi could count on him for a blunt assessment of her outfits or hairstyle. ​“He would put me in my place,” she said.

Elarabi, a former bank auditor, said she hasn’t been able to work through her grief since the fire. ​“I try to keep it together and make it look like I got it together… but sometimes I feel like I can’t even talk. You just don’t understand unless you’re a twin.”

“When he left, half of me left,” she said. ​“I’m not that person I used to be. I’m not that confident, strong, independent woman I used to be. Fifty percent of me is gone.”

Previous coverage of the 150 West St. fire:

• 2 Die In Hill Fire; Tenants Leap For Lives; Questions Raised On Smoke Alarms, Exits
• Tenants Who Escaped Deadly Fire: Smoke Alarm Didn’t Sound. Slumlord Didn’t Care
• Files Reveal Slumlord-Chasing Challenges
• Police Report: 150 West St. Landlord Assaulted Tenant Who Later Died In Fire
• Slumlord Unloads 2 More Hill Properties
• Tenants Return, Retrieve Burnt Belongings
• City Alerted To Perils Before Fatal Fire