By The Diary
10 Aug 2024, 09:19 AM EDT
Luis Alberto was arrested on suspicion of setting fire to his apartment in Brooklyn (NYC) during an hours-long standoff with police who arrived because he had threatened a neighbor with a knife.
The 37-year-old suspect, known to neighbors as “Poncho,” faces multiple criminal charges including arson, hate crime, criminal mischief, menacing and reckless endangerment for the incident that began at 3:45 p.m. Thursday inside his building on Fulton St. near Ocean Parkway in the Ocean Hill neighborhood.
Alberto lived in the basement of the building, home to the Exotic Cutz barbershop, with about 15 stray cats he took in. He had moved in about a decade ago, working odd jobs but was known to have a mean streak when he was drunk or high, neighbors said.
“When he wasn’t doing drugs, he was the nicest guy,” he told the Daily News a neighbor who asked not to be identified. But when he did, he became increasingly paranoid.
During a drug intoxication, he permanently sealed the metal doors outside the store that led to his basement apartment. “He thought the police were watching him and that made him paranoid,” the neighbor said. “So he took foam and sprayed it around the basement door to prevent anyone from coming in. They were coming in through the front door.”
Thursday’s chaos began when he allegedly threatened a neighbor with a knife and police were called. When NYPD arrived, Alberto barricaded himself in his basement apartment, leading to a three-hour standoff.
As officers evacuated the building and tried to get him to surrender, Alberto threatened to start a fire, officers said. At about 6:45 p.m., he set fire to a glass container containing a flammable liquid, causing a blaze.
The fire was contained to the basement, but smoke spread throughout the building. Firefighters and members of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit broke into the basement, opened the sealed doors, extinguished the fire and rescued Alberto, who was taken to Brookdale University Medical Center with minor injuries. A firefighter was also hospitalized with minor injuries.
The barbershop was closed and the building’s tenants were temporarily relocated. Alberto remained hospitalized yesterday and his arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court was pending.
In a similar case, last month a 63-year-old Hispanic man with apparent mental problems was identified by the New York police as the suspect who deliberately set fire to his residential building in Brooklyn.
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 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 2023, a man was sentenced to nearly three decades in prison for repeatedly stalking and threatening his ex-girlfriend and her three children to the point of burning down their Queens apartment because she ended their relationship without his consent.
All charges are merely accusations and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Seek help
- Call 911, 988 or (800)-942-6906.
- Text “WELL” to 65173.
- Check information at https://nycwell.cityofnewyork.us/es/ and www.988lineadevida.org