Firefighters
from two houses in SoHo, Engine 55 and Ladder Company 20, rushed to
Henry Street in Chinatown one June morning two years ago. Smoke filled a
ground-floor apartment.
Two women were inside, motionless.
“We
pulled them outside,” said a firefighter at the scene that day, June
29, 2012, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not
authorized to talk about the case.
Firefighters hurried to the women with EKG equipment. “They put pads on them and everything,” the firefighter said.
“Somebody
noticed a little hole right here,” he said, pointing to the inside
corner of his eye, “and felt the back of the head and said, ‘Oh.’ ”
Both
women had been fatally shot, their exit wounds not immediately visible
to their would-be rescuers. It is a rare, if age-old, turn of events in
the city: A person found dead after a fire turns out to have been the
victim of a homicide.
“Is the guy dead-dead?”
asked Richard Weldon, a retired captain from Ladder Company 20,
describing that discovery. “If you saw blood oozing out of his body, you
would be, right away, ‘What happened to him? The fire didn’t do
that.’ ”
For
investigators who arrive to answer that question, the case has already
been compromised by the inherent butting-against-one-another of members
of the two agencies called to the scene, firefighters and police
officers. The former, seeking to save lives, have often already removed
invaluable evidence from the scene — the body — and dowsed the room with
water in the course of their work. The latter, trained to keep a scene
pristine, arrive to what is, forensically speaking, a mess.
“The
crime scene has been altered,” Mr. Weldon said, “but you have a fire,
where the firemen are in charge. After that, the police take over.” And
precautions are taken, he said: “You try not to destroy the scene,
because every fire might be a crime.”
The
Fire Department publishes training guidelines for working within crime
scenes. “Firefighting operations and patient care should never be
compromised in order to protect the crime scene,” the rules state. “Life
is paramount.”
The
chaotic intersection of murder and fire played out on Tuesday in
Flushing, Queens, as a call of an apartment fire evolved into a recovery
of bodies and, then, a manhunt. Firefighters broke through the door to
Apt. 6C in a Roosevelt Avenue building and, dousing flames and peering
through thick smoke, found three bodies, eerily stacked.
“They
thought they were victims of homicide, or they thought, possibly
trapped by the fire, they huddled together,” said a police officer at
the scene on Tuesday, likewise not authorized to comment for
attribution.
Two of the bodies had stab wounds, and the third a slit throat, the police said.
Rule
5.1 in a fire-training bulletin: “Proceed with caution at crime scenes,
the perpetrator may still be on the premise.” The first responders
immediately began to work as if a killer was loose.
“Is
there a perp in the building?” the officer asked. “Is this a hit? How
many people live in the apartment? Who comes and goes? Is there video?
There’s 40 irons in the fire at this point.”
Identifying
the bodies was complicated. “You don’t have a positive ID,” the officer
said. “You’re not parading neighbors in there in that gruesome
situation to get an ID.”
Detectives
focused on the body with the slash to the throat, identified as that of
Jong Lee, 50; the other two dead people were his 54-year-old wife and
their 15-year-old son. In Mr. Lee’s pocket was a suicide note that said
the family was suffering from troubles and that “we all have to leave,”
the police said. The case, seemingly open-and-shut, left the lingering
question: Why the fire?
“You’re
trying to apply logic to illogical behavior,” the officer said. “I
don’t think he was looking to cover up the crime scene, because he took
his life. I don’t think he was looking to make it look like someone else
did it, because he left a suicide note.”
On
Thursday, Apt. 6C was dark behind a padlocked door, the smell of smoke
still strong enough that, down the hall, neighbors tucked rolled-up
towels under their doors.
The
firefighters were long gone. One would imagine the sight of a gunshot
wound or a slashed throat could rattle someone who is not, like homicide
detectives, steeped in those images.
“It’s an inherently dangerous job,” said Robert G. Byrnes, chief fire marshal. “We deal with very fragile moments in life.”
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