Paul Bass Photo
As a crew removed the last scraps of a once-proud three-story home that burned to the ground, officials asked for help in figuring out who set the fire.
The Friday blaze — which leveled a three-story building with eight apartments above the former home of the Precision Kutz barber shop at the corner of Dixwell Avenue and Division Street — left 24 people homeless as of Sunday. It also left behind a half-dozen clues that led investigators to conclude that it was a case of arson.
Fire Marshal Joe Cappucci said Sunday that he made the arson ruling based on the work of a black Labrador Retriever.
The three-alarm fire broke out some time before 3:30 p.m. Friday. It quickly engulfed the building in flames. Fifty-four firefighters spent hours getting the blaze under control.
Once they did so, the black lab — belonging to the state fire marshal’s office — went to work. It sniffed the premises and discovered at least “half a dozen” traces of accelerant, according to Cappucci.
Cappucci said the traces were found in the rear of the building. Because the rear had already collapsed, it was unclear whether the fire was set inside or outside of the building.
The city’s sending samples of the accelerant to the state police crime lab, which will test them to determine what kind of chemicals were used.
Meanwhile, officials are trying to find out who set the fire. So far they haven’t had much luck, Cappucci said. A police detective and fire investigator interviewed around 100 people at the scene of the fire. Nobody reported any tips on how the fire started.
So now Cappucci’s asking anyone with information to call the department’s arson tip line at 203 – 777-4455. The department also plans to poster the area Monday asking for information.
“Somewhere somebody knows something,” Cappucci said. “The question is: Will they come forward?”
The fire took place in the heart of Newhallville, where police have had similar trouble finding people to come forward with information about a rash of shootings and homicides.
As knots of neighbors in their Sunday best filed into nearby churches, a crew from Abcon Environmental Inc. was at work Sunday morning removing the remaining planks and other detritus from the demolished building. A small mound of charred debris was all that remained of the once-proud white corner building.
Abcon Operations Manager Mark Sergi (pictured) said the crew would probably be finished cleaning up by Monday, and surrounding streets reopened to traffic. Dixwell remained blocked off between Gibbs Street and Harding Place Sunday, and Division was closed from Shelton to Dixwell.
Next Sergi’s crew will fill in the hole left behind by the building, in order to make the property safe to walk on. He said he expects to finish that work on Tuesday.
Sergi spoke of how burned-out, now-homeless tenants returned to the scene while his crew was demolishing the building, hoping to retrieve belongings. Then he encountered several people accompanying one woman who had lived in the building for over 20 years.
“All they wanted was a brick,” he said. He brought them two. “They started crying. She said she wanted to put it on a mantle somewhere.”
Pretty scary to think someone would light this in the middle of the day with people inside. If this had been the middle of the night we could be talking about more than a loss of a building. Hopefully the guilty party is caught soon.