Police arrested a former Gateway School student suspected of
setting the fire that razed four classrooms at the school in
January 2008, leaving dozens of emotionally and mentally
handicapped students with no place to go.
Police arrested a former Gateway School student suspected of setting the fire that razed four classrooms at the school in January 2008, leaving dozens of emotionally and mentally handicapped students with no place to go.
Police arrested the 16-year-old, white Gilroy High School student Wednesday morning and brought him in for questioning at the Chestnut Fire Station, where he “made some admissions during the interview,” said Sgt. Jim Gillio. He was booked on one felony count of arson, said Detective Mitch Madruga, and then released to a guardian.
He was not a Gateway student at the time of the fire, police said.
The four-alarm fire investigators dubbed “suspicious” gutted a building that houses four classrooms about 10:15 p.m. Jan. 2, 2008. By the time firefighters arrived, the fire had fully engulfed the building. No one was injured but the building suffered major damage that was further compounded when a second fired raged through the school later that summer.
The boy has not been linked with the second Gateway fire or several other arsons that flared up around Gilroy during January 2008, Gillio said. The boy started the fire with matches after riding his bike to the school that night, Madruga said. Police have not identified a motive at this point, he said.
Madruga said the police department was also not ready to release where in the building the fire started or how the blaze came to engulf several classrooms.
“We have to be careful about what we release because it could hinder the prosecution,” Gillio said. “We don’t know at this point how much this person is responsible for.”
Police linked the juvenile to the arson after substantiating rumors that were circulating among other GHS students, police said. A campus supervisor alerted police after catching wind of the rumors, police said. Police do not know if the student has returned to school.
Several other fires broke out around the same time as the first Gateway fire. Firefighters responded to one in a large trash bin in an alley off Fairview Drive, near Princevalle Street, police said. The bin is just blocks away from the school and the fire started just 15 minutes after the school fire was reported. However, the bin fire was quickly extinguished and no damage was done to nearby structures.
The fires are reminiscent of two arsons and a suspicious fire that lit up south Gilroy during the early hours of Dec. 2, 2007. During a five-hour time period, a fire broke out at a paper mill and fires were set on the roof of Gilroy Ford Lincoln Mercury and in a trash bin at Gilroy Sports Park. These fires came just a week after somebody started a fire using an aerosol can in an unfinished residence in South County Housing’s Cannery development in East Gilroy. Nobody was hurt in any of these fires.
The police department has not yet forwarded the case to the Santa Clara County Office of the District Attorney, so no charges have been filed.
