GILROY
– Are arsonists trying to make up for lost time? Local
investigators are puzzling over four suspicious fires in three days
last week that may have been set deliberately.
GILROY – Are arsonists trying to make up for lost time? Local investigators are puzzling over four suspicious fires in three days last week that may have been set deliberately.
First, an abandoned Oldsmobile went up in flames in an alley off Rosanna Street early Thursday morning. The next day, an abandoned house across Las Animas Avenue from the northern city limit burned down. Early Saturday morning, six old buses at a San Martin junkyard became an inferno that occupied firefighters for five hours. That night, a fire broke out at a duplex on Church Street.
Of these, all but the abandoned house are currently classified as “suspicious” – meaning fire investigators have reason to believe each of them were set intentionally, based on preliminary investigations.
Capt. Ed Bozzo, the Gilroy Fire Department’s head investigator, declined to elaborate on evidence he and police and fire investigators have that indicates arson as a cause in the two suspicious city fires, saying it could prompt suspects to leave town.
“We don’t like to give out information prematurely,” Bozzo said Tuesday.
Bozzo did say he’s confident the two fires inside city limits are not linked and that it’s coincidental they happened within two days of each other. Gilroy and California Department of Forestry investigators haven’t yet compared notes on whether the city blazes might be linked to the San Martin bus fire.
“We haven’t linked them yet, but we’re definitely going to look at that,” CDF Capt. Tim Main said.
If police and fire investigators conclude the two city fires were intentionally lit, it would triple the number of confirmed arson cases within city limits this year. Before last week, only one arson case had been recorded in 2003, according to the GPD. In 2002, there were two. The state average in 2002 was 0.4 per 1,000 people – about 18 for a city Gilroy’s size.
Arson used to be more commonplace in Gilroy, but it has declined dramatically in recent years. A decade ago, in 1993, the Gilroy Police Department documented close to 100 cases.
“We had a lot of gang-related stuff going on at that time,” Bozzo said.
Saturday morning’s bus fire was the most severe of the four blazes last week. Just after 6 a.m., CDF and Santa Clara County firefighters were called to San Martin Auto Wrecking, owned by Luis Maciao, where six large, retired municipal buses were engulfed in flame.
“They were stacked so close together we couldn’t get in,” CDF Capt. Main said.
Firefighters called on Marx Towing Inc. of Gilroy to bring its biggest tow truck, capable of hauling semi trucks, to pull apart the buses. The buses’ tires were still blazing as they were pried loose from the clump, but it allowed firefighters to get at the inside buses.
“It was a pretty impressive fire,” Main said. “We were committed for about five hours.”
Maciao estimated he lost $60,000 in salvage value from the buses.
Main described the fire as “very suspicious.” Although CDF investigators haven’t found any physical evidence of arson, they still view that as the leading cause – partly because of a process of elimination and partly due to the owner’s suspicion that some trespassers might have wanted to get him back for making them leave his property. Maciao told firefighters he had often run off drug users and homeless people and that people had stolen parts from his vehicles in the past.
“This is about the third fire we have had out there in the last three years,” Main said.
Plus, Main said, accidental causes don’t seem to fit. For example, he said, the buses were free of flammable clutter and debris before the blaze, making it unlikely that a trespasser’s cigarette butt would ignite them.
The buses were among the first generation to be fueled by propane rather than gasoline, Maciao told firefighters. The vehicles had been on Maciao’s lot for about two years.
