By The Diary
Aug 28, 2024, 2:00 PM EDT
Peter and Pamela Miller have pleaded guilty in connection with a fire that killed two sisters at a luxury vacation rental home in The Hamptons, Long Island (NY).
Sisters Jillian and Lindsay Wiener, ages 21 and 19, died in a house fire in Noyack early on the morning of August 3, 2022. Peter Miller (56) pleaded guilty to two counts of criminally negligent homicide and Pamela Miller (55) pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment. They are scheduled to be sentenced on November 7, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday.
According to investigators, the couple’s vacation rental home in Southampton had 29 safety violations, including multiple problems with smoke detectors.
If you own a rental property, you have a duty to make sure it is safe.
Peter Miller, 56, co-owner of the Noyac home where a major fire in August 2022 killed two young women, pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide. His wife, Pamela Miller, 55, pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment.https: //t.co/UNMjQh0eOb
— The Sag Harbor Express (@sag_express) August 26, 2024
“We take all matters related to housing regulations very seriously, as they are crucial to public safety,” District Attorney Ray Tierney said in a news release. “If you own a rental home, you have a duty to ensure that it is safe.”
The Wiener sisters, along with their parents and brother, rented the Miller home for their family vacation while visiting from Maryland. On the night of Aug. 2, 2022, they attempted to use a grill in an outdoor kitchen attached to the main house, according to authorities.
When the grill didn’t seem to work, they closed it and cooked inside. That same night the house caught fire. The Wiener parents were awakened around 3:30 a.m. by the sound of breaking glass, she recalled. Daily News.
The family scrambled to escape the flames. The parents were able to escape from the first floor, where they were sleeping, while their son Zachary Wiener, 23, jumped out of a second-floor window. But the sisters were unable to escape. Their father, Lew Wiener, tried to run back to get them, but the raging fire stopped him.
Responding firefighters found three people outside — the girls’ father, mother and brother — who escaped the blaze with minor injuries. They later located the two sisters inside the home. An ambulance took them to SUNY Southampton Hospital, where they were pronounced dead.
Jillian was a rising senior at the University of Michigan and Lindsay was ready to return to Tulane University for her sophomore year.
His father serves as president of one of the largest Reform Jewish synagogues in the country. “The world has lost two beautiful lights today, and the community of Washington Hebrew Congregation is heartbroken,” the synagogue presided over by the victims’ father, a native of Williston Park, NY, who died in April of this year, said in a statement.
In a similar case, yesterday a 77-year-old Latino man died when his home caught fire, also on Long Island. In June, Maria Arreola (47) and her son Andrew Salomon (26) died when their home caught fire in New Rochelle (NY).
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 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 the relationship without his consent.