By The newspaper
18 Jul 2024, 12:34 PM EDT
Stanley Garcia, a 63-year-old man with apparent mental problems, has been identified by the New York police as the suspect who deliberately set fire to his residential building in Brooklyn.
An FDNY source said the suspect who started the fire intentionally kept the door locked to prevent people from leaving. Miraculously no one was killed, but the blaze left 11 people injured early Tuesday morning. Dozens of families were also forced to evacuate the building and are currently homeless. They were only allowed to enter and retrieve some of their belongings hours after the fire.
According to ABC News, Investigators recovered video of the suspect pouring an accelerant, possibly gasoline, on the door of his first-floor apartment and setting it on fire.
Garcia has prior arrests for criminal contempt, menacing and resisting arrest, police said. In total, he has six prior interactions with the NYPD for being an emotionally disturbed person, not taking medication, acting erratically, hearing voices and talking about harming himself.
Nine residents, including a child, and two firefighters were injured. The blaze broke out overnight around 3 a.m. Tuesday on Evergreen Avenue in the Bushwick section.
“You couldn’t see anything in front of you, but when we tried to open it, he wouldn’t let us open it. Luckily, my dad pulled it open, we pushed it and got out,” said resident Lilia Soriano.
Some residents said Garcia had caused them problems in the past and it was only a matter of time until something like this happened.
All charges are merely accusations and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
At the end of May, a 65-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of starting a fire that killed her boyfriend in Brooklyn (NYC). Also that month, the NYPD determined that Marie Helene Michaud, a 96-year-old immigrant great-grandmother, was the victim of homicide because the fire that ended her life in Queens (NYC) was arson. A neighbor said that the tragedy began with the intentional burning of a mattress.
In December, a landlord was charged with attempted murder and arson for allegedly setting fire to his Brooklyn rental property while a family of eight tenants, six of them children, were inside.
In September, a man was sentenced to nearly three decades in prison for repeatedly stalking and threatening his ex-girlfriend and her three children by burning down their Queens apartment because she ended their relationship without his consent.
In February of this year, a 19-year-old Hispanic teenager admitted to having started several fires in a span of seven days, including two cars and a historic building more than 100 years old in New Jersey.
In late January, a 73-year-old man with mental illness was set on fire with gasoline in Brooklyn (NYC) by a neighbor to whom he owed $100, a debt that he had already paid, according to his sister.
In October 2022, an alleged arsonist from Guatemala was federally charged with setting fire to a spa on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (NYC) with a 60-year-old worker inside.
I looked for help
- Call 911, 988 or (800)-942-6906.
- Text “WELL” to 65173.
- Check information at https://nycwell.cityofnewyork.us/es/ and www.988lineadevida.org