Fire-Fighting Arsonist Sentenced to 10 Years

PYRO

FAIRFIELD - A former volunteer firefighter got 10 years in prison today for a string of arsons.


Christopher Message had been accused of setting fires in Fairfield, Monroe and Easton.



Message told the court he suffered from mental and emotional issues that were worsened by substance abuse.

5 Killed in Christmas Morning House Fire

Who could fathom such a thing happening on Christmas morning? What a world..


LA Times-A Christmas morning house fire in an upscale Stamford neighborhood killed five people, three of them children, leaving neighbors and firefighters in tears.

Firefighters rescued two people from the blaze: Madonna Badger, 47, the mother of the children, and a man whose identity was not available. Badger is a New York advertising executive. Police later said the man was a contractor renovating the home, and the two dead adults were Badger's parents, who were visiting for Christmas.

Neighbor Charles Mangano said he saw rescuers walking Badger and the man away from the house toward an ambulance.

"I heard her say, 'My whole life is in there,' as she walked out," Mangano said. "They were both obviously in a state of shock."

Neighbors in the Shippan Point neighborhood, which juts into Long Island Sound, said they were awakened by screaming and ran outside to see fire consuming the house.

"I heard someone yell, 'Help, help, help me!' and I started sprinting up my driveway," Mangano told the Advocate of Stamford. Firefighters were already there.

"I just came out as a neighbor," he said. "There's really nothing I could do."

Stamford Fire Chief Antonio Conte said firefighters got the call at 4:52 a.m. and arrived to find the house engulfed. They rescued Badger and the man, but could not reach the other five.

"There was so much flame and heat it drove the firefighters back," Conte said. "They tried several times. We knew all five were in there. We just couldn't get to them."

Conte became emotional as he talked about the fire.

"I've been on this job 38 years," he said, his voice cracking. "Not an easy day."

Stamford's fire marshal is investigating, but Conte said it would probably take several days to determine what happened.

Badger had three daughters — a 10-year-old and 7-year-old twins. Her husband, Matthew Badger, was in New York City. Police said they drove him to Stamford on Sunday.

Badger bought the three-story, 3,300-square-foot, five-bedroom house overlooking Long Island Sound in December 2010 for $1.72 million. The house had been undergoing extensive renovations, neighbors said.

Becki Anderson, 43, of Stamford grew up in the home and said her parents sold it to Badger.

"Our hearts go out to Madonna and her family," Anderson said. "Our entire community is shocked and stunned."

Anderson said she and her husband took a long walk Christmas afternoon, and everyone they met was talking about the fire.

"Everybody's speaking in hushed tones, and it's sad," she said. "I don't think it matters it's Christmas. It would be sad any day of the year."

Badger, an advertising executive who founded the New York-based Badger & Winters Group, gained fame for Calvin Klein underwear and Obsession perfume ads. She founded her company at the age of 30.

Stamford, a city of 117,000, is about 25 miles northeast of New York City.

"It is a terrible, terrible day," Mayor Michael Pavia said. "There probably has not been a worse Christmas day in the city of Stamford."

This Day In History

Aug 24 1812
The White House and other public buildings in the District of Columbia are torched by the British.

Aug 24 1981
Mark David Chapman sentenced to 20 years for killing Beatle John Lennon.

Wallingford Central Hotel Fire

I skimming shadowlands.net in search for haunted locale, and read this description:

Wallingford, CT-
Shell Station on Center- Now a Texaco station. - Once a hotel that had a fire, killing most of the people inside. Then the Shell gas station was built in its place. It is now out of business because of hauntings occuring in station. Not only scaring customers but workers too.

http://theshadowlands.net/places/connecticut.htm


I looked it up, and sure enough, there was a hotel fire:

-article link-

Creepy. Wonder what's going on with the location lately..

I added it to my haunted locale map, by the way!

Five Die in Italian Riviera Train-Gas Blast

(CNN) -- A gas explosion from a cargo train carrying fuel tanks killed at least five people and injured 35 others Monday night in a town in western Italy, a local government official said.

The train, traveling from La Spezia to Pisa, was carrying gas tanks and derailed while passing through the station in the coastal town of Viareggio, the official, Antonio Garufi, told CNN. The station and a few nearby buildings caught fire and were evacuated, he said.

The five fatalities were victims of a resulting building fire, Garufi said. The train operators were not injured.

The explosion happened at about 11:45 p.m. (5:45 p.m. ET).

Woman Found Dead Was Witness To Murder

BOSTON -- A Plymouth woman whose body was found smoldering in the Blue Hills Reservation in Quincy on Saturday was a witness to a murder 12 years ago, according to court documents.

Kristyn L. Genereux's testimony helped convict two men in a drug-related murder in Brockton. The men are serving life sentences at a state prison.

The medical examiner's office officials identified the woman on Wednesday after releasing photos of rings found on the victim's body.

A pear-shaped diamond solitaire was on the victim's ring finger of their left hand, and a 10-karat gold band with several small stones, possibly a wedding band, was found on the pinky finger of that hand.

The third ring found had three round stones in heart-shaped settings -- a ruby, an emerald in the center and a pink tourmaline -- and is often called a "Mother's Ring."

Genereux, who lived at 3A Cortelli Court, was the mother of four children. She was found dead by a hiker on Saturday, just days after her 42nd birthday.

The medical examiner has also not yet ruled on a cause or manner of death, but police said that accelerant was used to burn the body, officials said.

Owners of Day Care That Burned Quit Government Jobs

HERMOSILLO, Mexico (CNN) -- Two of the owners of the day-care center that burned Friday, killing 44 children, have resigned jobs they had with the government, they told reporters Tuesday.

Antonio Salido, a functionary for the state of Sonora's secretary of urban infrastructure, and Alfonso Escalante, a sub-secretary of livestock farming, said they were resigning so that there would be no obstruction in the investigation into the cause of the fire.

Salido, speaking for both men, told reporters they had not used their government positions to obtain the day-care concession.

"We want to show you how deeply we feel about what happened in the terrible accident that occurred at ABC Day Care," he said.

"It passed the security measures and norms of operation required by the Mexican Institute of Social Security," he said, referring to the governmental organization that oversees the state-run school.

He noted that the institute's director, Daniel Karam Toumeh, said Sunday that the building had passed an inspection on May 26.

Abel Murrieta Gutierrez, the attorney general of Sonora, told CNN en Español that the investigation would not be affected by the fact that two of the owners worked for the government.

"It doesn't matter to us if they were or were not functionaries," he said.

Relatives of the victims and people seeking better security for day-care centers are planning to march Wednesday evening from near the day-care center to the government center.

The fire started Friday afternoon in an air-conditioning unit located in an adjacent warehouse, the attorney general of Sonora said Monday. Investigators are trying to determine whether the fire was caused by an overheated motor or deficiencies in its installation, Abel Murrieta Gutierrez said.

The fire then moved toward bookshelves on a wall shared with the building housing the center, which held 141 children and day-care workers, he added.

The two buildings also shared a roof, which contained a false bottom made of polyurethane. That overheated, emitting toxic fumes, he said.

As of Tuesday, 22 children remained hospitalized with burns.

One of them was the daughter of Raul Alvarez, who prayed Tuesday at an improvised altar outside the Children's Hospital in Hermosillo. "We went to see her this morning, and she was stable, the little girl," he said.

Hermosillo is the capital of the state of Sonora, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of the U.S. border in northwestern Mexico.

It has no hospitals that specialize in burns, so doctors here have been working to stabilize those most badly burned before sending them on for treatment in other cities.

"The most important thing is not so much the burn, but stabilizing them, making sure the kidney is functioning, the lung is functioning, the liver is functioning, the brain is functioning," said Raymond Lopez, Sonora's health secretary.

Watch a town deep in shock »

This Honestly Breaks My Heart...

The number of children who have died as a result of this daycare center fire has risen to 41... So tragic. Is this a result of arson?

HERMOSILLO, Mexico (CNN) -- Parents of the children trapped in a burning Mexican day care center rammed their vehicles into the building to try to free the trapped children, witnesses told CNN.

At least 41 children died when flames engulfed the building on Friday, Mexico's Public Health Ministry said Sunday. Dozens more are in hospitals in Mexico and the United States.

Neighbors described parents arriving at the day care center completely desperate, seeing it engulfed in flames and knowing there was no way to get the children out, CNN's Thelma Gutierrez reported from the scene. They say they could hear the cries of the children and the screams of their parents.

The building had two doors, but one was padlocked shut, officials said. Windows were too high for the children to reach.
Watch parents gather at site of fire »

"When we went out and ran towards the nursery, teachers already had many children outside, those who could walk properly," said one man at the scene, who did not give his name.

"A pickup truck broke down the walls. The dad of one of the kids broke down one of the walls with his car driving in reverse, and that helped us a bit," he said.

One mother waited hours for information about her son, she said.

"They didn't tell us anything, nothing until like 6 p.m.," she said, when she was finally told her son was at Chavez Hospital.

"We went there and we saw that he was badly burned, 75 percent of his body was burned." The woman said they operated on the boy, but he died.

The cause of Friday's blaze remains unknown, but investigators concluded that the fire did not start inside the ABC Day Care, said Eduardo Bours, the governor of Sonora state.

As of Saturday night, at least 23 children remained hospitalized, 15 of them in critical condition, Sonora spokesman Daniel Duran told CNN. Another 10 children had been transported to other hospitals: eight to Guadalajara, one to Ciudad Obregon, and two to Sacramento, California.

A team of 29 medical experts in Hermosillo was deciding whether any more victims would be moved to the Shriners Hospital in Sacramento, or elsewhere.
In addition, six adults were injured, Duran said.

"Without a doubt this is the worst disaster we've had," Bours told CNN.

President Felipe Calderon traveled to Hermosillo on Saturday.

The president arrived with Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont and Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova to get firsthand updates from doctors and investigators, the state news agency Notimex reported.

Calderon ordered the nation's attorney general to investigate the blaze.

Most of the victims died from smoke inhalation and not burns, Bours said. But the fire was serious enough for the roof to collapse, he added.

At the time of the blaze, 142 children were inside the ABC Day Care. The day care is for children ages 2 to 4, but Bours confirmed that children even younger were among the victims.

All the children at the center had been accounted for by Saturday evening, Bours said.

A severely burned 3-year-old girl arrived Saturday at the Sacramento hospital -- where pediatric burn treatment is a specialty -- and was in critical condition, according to Dr. Tina Palmieri, assistant chief of the burn unit.

The child was burned over 80 percent of her body, the doctor told reporters. She said the hospital normally can save just over half of the children with burns that severe.

In Hermosillo, a large crowd gathered outside of the emergency entrance of the city's general hospital and many people consoled each other, video from the scene showed.

"They told me that this happened in a matter of five minutes," Hermosillo Mayor Ernesto Gandara told reporters after surveying the scene.

27 Children Die In Mexico Daycare Center Fire

HERMOSILLO, Mexico (CNN) -- Twenty-seven children were killed and more than 100 others were injured Friday when their daycare center caught fire in the northwestern state of Sonora, the local governor said, citing figures from the state attorney's office.

The victims were from one to 5 years old, said Sonora Governo Eduardo Bours Castelo.

The fire appeared to have started at 3 p.m. (2200 GMT) in a warehouse next door and spread to the state-run institution, news reports said.

By then, many children had already been picked up by their parents from the one-story building, but others came after the blaze had been put out. As they came upon the scene, some screamed their children's names and others fainted.

Cop Sets Woman on Fire, Arrests Her For Being on Fire

“I saw someone breaking the law so I arrested them.”

That’s the way Green County Sheriff’s deputy Marcus Horna describes it. The incident he refers to happened last wednesday on highway 311 near the Ghor rd. intersection. Janice Behr was pulled on the shoulder because her tire blew out. Behr called 911 for assistance and Deputy Horna responded to the call.

As he approached the vehicle, Deputy Horna was caught on dashcam footage violating a department policy. Footage shows him walk out of his car with a cigarette clearly dangling from his left hand. Behr, who works for a BP station, had just delivered some plastic cans of gasoline to a local hardware store because of a special trade arrangement the two businesses share. Unknown to Behr, some gas had splashed out onto her back seat. Dashcam footage then shows Deputy Horna, with total disregard for Behr’s vehicle, flick his cigarette into the back seat of her car.

“It seemed managable and this is my only car,” is the excuse Behr offers for trying to put the fire out instead of leaving the car. Footage shows her lean into the back seat and begin smacking at the flames while Deputy Horna looks on. After some seconds, flames can be seen moving to the front seat, where Behr’s right arm catches fire. She then runs out of the vehicle in a panic, waving her arm around like something out of a movie.

But what happens next is the most surprising. Footage shows Deputy Horna rush over to Behr, where he grabs her by the neck and throws her to the ground. Behr believed that Horna was trying to put her out, which he did, but only because he was handcuffing her. Incredibly, Behr can be heard on camera wailing in agonizing pain while Horna drags her up by the very arm that was burning and pulls her back to his patrol car.

When asked to defend his actions Deputy Horna repeated his earlier statement, “I saw someone breaking the law so I arrested them.” When pressed for further comment he added, “The woman leaped out the car with her arm on fire and was whirling about like a maniac so I cuffed her and charged her. It is against the law to do that, you can’t run around with your arm in flames, so I charged her.”

And what was the charge?

“Illegal use of a firearm,” Horna says.

Deputy Horna is currently on paid administrative leave, but is expected to return this month because he is the only person with a key to the garage.

Police Say Woman Set Herself On Fire

BURTCHVILLE, Mich. -- The St. Clair County Sheriff said a woman who was set on fire has no one to blame but herself.

Authorities have charged Shannon Lee Rhodes with filing a false police report after she claimed an unknown man set her on fire.

But the prosecution said Rhodes injured herself.

"Our office filed charges today (Wednesday) against Shannon Lee Rhodes for the felony offense of false report of a felony," said St. Clair County Prosecutor Michael Wendling. "We believe the injuries were self-inflicted."

Rhodes, of Burtchville Township, was arrested Tuesday and arraigned Wednesday afternoon.

Rhodes, 39, is going through a divorce and investigators believe martial problems are behind the incident. Her husband is on a tether and out on bond while facing charges in a domestic situation involving the couple.

"We believe there are some domestic issues going on between her and her husband," Wendling said. "We also felt there were some other issues that may have caused her to believe she would not be burned so badly and this was an incident that got out of hand."

The incident happened three months ago. Rhodes' 12-year-old son was home at the time and called 9-1-1.

"My mom just caught on fire!," the boy can be heard saying during the emergency call.

When the 911 operator asked "What's on fire?", the boy replied, "My mom."

After catching fire, Rhodes ran to the shower to put out flames on her chest, police said.

Rhodes later told police the incident happened when an unknown man knocked on her front door, doused her in a flammable liquid and lit her on fire.

Sheriff Tim Donnellon said the charges against Rhodes should put any community fears to rest.

"There isn't some mad man running around out there setting civilians on fire," Donnellon said. "At the conclusion of the interview with Rhodes (Tuesday), she was placed into custody."

13,500 Flee Growing California Wildfire

Really getting serious over there.. =[

SANTA BARBARA, California (CNN) -- A wind-fanned wildfire spread across 1,300 acres in Santa Barbara County, California, early Thursday, forcing 13,500 residents to evacuate and destroying at least 20 homes.

The fire, strengthened by high temperatures and low humidity, engulfed mansions in the coastal community's foothills.

"It's just horrible. We're all in a panic here. It's terrifying," iReporter Exton Quinn said Thursday.

Quinn said she and a friend were out shooting video Wednesday night when "all of a sudden the wind changed and a house caught on fire just behind me," she said.
Watch fire roar on hillsides »

Her house, on the edge of the mandatory evacuation zone, hadn't burned, she said, but the artist and architect said she was concerned as she headed for Los Angeles on Thursday morning.

More than 1,400 firefighters are battling the blaze and 10 have been injured, Schwarzenegger said, lauding their efforts. Watch Gov. Schwarzenegger urge vigilance »

"Firefighters, thank you, thank you, thank you for your hard work," he said.
A day earlier, fire officials expressed how difficult it is to fight the blaze.

"The fire is moving very, very rapidly," Santa Barbara County Fire Capt. David Sadecki said Wednesday. "This is an uncontrolled wildfire."
"I have hundreds of paintings, so I would just lose everything," if her duplex did fall victim to the flames, she said.

About 5,400 homes have been evacuated and another 3,500 are threatened, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said at a news conference.

The blaze, which started Tuesday, came six months after the Tea Fire destroyed about 200 homes in the Santa Barbara area.

Though there was no official count on homes destroyed early Thursday, one firefighter said he saw 20 homes scorched.

Firefighting helicopters and aircraft as well as 177 engines were being used.

On Thursday morning, iReporter Adrian Casillas, a student at the University of California-Santa Barbara, said it felt more like evening.

"I'm looking out towards the east, and it's just a big cloud going from the coast all the way to the Channel Islands," he said of smoke from the fire.

"The sun is just rising, but it looks a little bit like sunset because the cloud is covering the sun," he said.

Wildfires also were burning in Arizona near the Mexican border.

One blaze covered about 4,000 acres near the city of Sierra Vista. It had destroyed three homes and sent an area resident to the hospital with third-degree burns, according to the National Forest Service.

Three other smaller fires in the area were largely or completely contained, fire officials said.

This Day In History

Apr 21 1847
Lewis Keseberg, the final member of the Donner Party still stranded in the mountains, is escorted to safety by a fourth rescue party. Later accounts hold that Keseberg was discovered "seated, like a ghoul, in the midst of dead bodies, with his face and hands smeared with blood, and a kettle of human flesh boiling over the fire."

Apr 21 1910
American original Mark Twain dies of heart failure in Redding, CT.

Apr 21 1930
320 inmates are left to burn alive during a fire in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Locked into their cells, the men could not escape the smoke and flames.

Apr 21 1992
Convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris consumes two large pizzas, a bucket of fried chicken, and some ice cream on the eve of his execution. Later, before the gas chamber is activated, Harris propounds: "You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the grim reaper."