Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  I never smell smoke without missing him.

  In a world full of strange people, firebugs are among the strangest.

  Take June Ann Olsen, a fresh-faced blonde who once burned down an entire Miami city block.

  She would lure men, including a famous TV producer, into motel rooms. After they were undressed, she would slosh lighter fluid onto the bed and torch it. “You ought to see them run,” she told me. “It’s pretty funny sometimes.” During the afterglow, she would telephone her favorite fire captain, Frank Fitzpatrick, for long chats. She would flirt, and he would try to talk her into surrendering. Sent off to an institution, she was later released. “I’m lonesome,” she said. “Maybe it’s not too late to start a new life.” That was the last time we talked. Next time I saw her name, it was on a police report; she was dead.

  Though many amateur arsonists die trapped by their own flames, June Ann Olsen did not.

  She was struck and killed by a train.

  Nothing about arson is funny—or harmless.

  A flaming inferno, at three A.M. on a Friday the thirteenth, killed three people and severely burned six others at a small South Beach hotel. The death toll would have climbed far higher except for the efforts of the two heroic rookie cops who arrived first. One made a perfect catch of a baby dropped out a third-floor window surrounded by flames. Several other infants and small children were dropped by adults who leaped after them. Two men hurtled horizontally out third-floor windows across a five-foot alleyway and crashed through the third-floor windows of the hotel next door. One of them, a tractor-trailer driver, said he hesitated until he saw someone else escape through the window next to his.

  “He put me to shame,” he told me later. “That little, skinny Latin guy flew across the alley like Superman, with flames shooting right behind him.” He followed, into the next hotel, dashed down three flights to the street and darted right back into the burning building. “I had to go back,” he said. “People were in there. I could hear them. They were my friends.”

  Three policemen stopped him on a smoky second-floor landing. “You can’t go up there,” they said.

  “Somebody has to, you or me,” he told them. He could hear Rita, a neighbor, and Bessie, a senior citizen, screaming for help. He told the officers where the women were. Firemen in oxygen masks led the women to the stairwell a short time later, and he and the officers helped them to the street

  Among the dead were a mother and her daughter, who was visiting from Cuba. They had not seen each other in thirteen years. Reunited at last, they died together, trapped in a blazing third-floor hallway. The wind-whipped blaze took a hundred firefighters hours to control. An entire block was evacuated as the flames threatened to spread. Sixty were left homeless, with nothing.

  The deaths were murder. Two men ran from the hotel and sped away in a white car moments before fire erupted. Gasoline used to ignite the blaze had been siphoned from a car parked behind the building.

  Some people set fires for revenge, some out of greed, some because it excites them sexually.

  Others ignite the spark to cover up some other crime or sometimes to commit suicide. I have little sympathy for careless smokers, false-alarm setters, or thoughtless would-be suicides, like the man who torched the rooming house where he lived. He left his neighbors homeless and wound up in the hospital, along with three Miami firemen injured fighting the blaze.

  Amateur arsonists agreed to burn a Miami Beach beauty salon for a thousand dollars. Beginning at the front, they poured fifteen gallons of gasoline throughout the shop, working their way toward the back. Drifting gas fumes reached the back door before they did, and a pilot light in a water heater near the door ignited them. A thirteen-year-old newsboy selling papers across the street heard the salon windows explode and saw the building tremble. The million-dollar fire destroyed a block-long row of stores: a florist, a pizza restaurant, a bar, a shoe repair, a barber shop, and a pet store full of animals, all of whom perished.

  The first policeman to arrive found one of the arsonists slumped against a car, moaning, his clothes burned off. “I’ve seen people burned before,” Officer Kenneth Miller said. “But not like this. He had no ears, no nose, no fingers. He kept saying he couldn’t breathe—because his nose was gone.” The young man reached out his hand to Officer Chuck Hayes, pleading for help. When Hayes took it, the man’s skin came off in his hand.

  An accomplice escaped but was found slumped in his car miles away, critically burned over 85 percent of his body.

  The last thing another inept arsonist remembered was standing on a ladder sloshing cleaning fluid around a darkened store. Next thing he knew, he was facedown on the grass behind the burning building listening to the wail of approaching sirens. He had absent-mindedly lit a cigarette while pouring the flammable liquid.

  Sometimes you can spot the guilty party by checking out the would-be rescuers at the scene.

  Some people actually commit mass murder because they want to be heroes.

  The Avondale Hotel fire, the second worst blaze in Miami history, killed ten and injured fourteen. The first alarm came at 12:40 A.M. Flames had already engulfed the old forty-room hotel built during Miami’s World War I boom.

  A bus driver hit the horn and the brakes and ran to help. He placed his jacket beneath the head of a bleeding man who had just been carried from the building by two men. Then he saw the same two men urging a terrified elderly woman, screaming on a second-floor balcony, to jump. They kept shouting, promising to catch her. The flames crept closer. She arched her back as they singed her skin. Then she started screaming, “My hair! My hair!” She yanked her dress over her head and wrapped it around her burning hair to keep off the flames.

  The first of seventeen fire trucks roared up to the curb. Fire-fighters ran with a ladder and carried her down. A number of people, hair and clothing ablaze, had already leaped from ledges and balconies, fracturing legs, spines and ankles. Others dangled from windows. Firemen used hoses to drench a seventy-seven-year-old man who was about to jump, then rescued him.

  On their third or fourth inspection of the sagging second floor, four hours after they arrived, a captain heard a sound. A horribly burned woman rose from charred bedsheets, murmuring in agony, arms outstretched. Firemen swore she had not been on the bed before. She was burned over 100 percent of her body, and there was no way to save her. She died exactly a week to the hour from the moment flames and screams awoke her in the night.

  The fire was arson.

  Months later the two men who had played hero that hellish night were arrested. The charges: arson and ten counts of first-degree murder. Suspects from the start, each had his own motive: One wanted to be a hero, to dramatically rescue the owner, so he and his common-law wife would not be evicted as scheduled the next day. The other intended to loot his neighbors’ rooms after they evacuated.

  They only planned a small fire. But when one set a match to the cane bottom of a wooden chair in the lobby, the blaze escaped them. They had not considered the age and dryness of the building and the stairwell draft that caused flames to leap instantly through the old structure where innocent people were asleep in their beds.

  One got twenty years; the other was sentenced to fifteen.

  Sometimes you can spot the arsonist simply by scanning the crowds. You can see the look in his eyes—along with reflected flames.

  A nightmare at a paint store virtually wiped out Miami Engine Company Two eight months after they fought the Avondale blaze. Firefighters had been battling the 3:30 A.M. blaze for only fifteen minutes when disaster struck. The men of Engine Company Two had knocked down the fire and were advancing on the nearly extinguished flames. Four firemen were deep inside the building, when trapped fumes exploded with a roar.

  Firemen outside were hurled ten or fifteen feet by the force of the blast and the intense heat wave accompanying it. The front of the store collapsed on a fireman, who screamed for help. Another rolled in the street
in flames. Injured firemen lay scattered across the pavement, and now three businesses were ablaze, flames shooting out of the buildings.

  Miami policemen manned the hoses. “There were firemen lying all over, some burned, some dazed,” police officer Charles Lincoln told me later. “We didn’t know if it was going to explode again. My first thought was for the firemen inside.” He asked an injured fireman if everyone was out.

  “Al? Where’s Al?” the shocked fireman mumbled.

  The young cop dashed toward the building. In the intense heat close to the flames, he found a dazed fireman, incoherent, his face cut and bleeding. “Are you Al?” he asked. The fireman said he was. Lincoln led the man to safety, then tried to help a badly burned firefighter sprawled in the street. He used a penknife to cut clothes away from burned flesh.

  Fireman Louis Kickasola, thirty-one, knocked down by the blast and surrounded by flames, figured he was going to die. He crawled toward the blown-out front of the store and nearly made it, but a rush of air ignited the paint and chemicals that had spattered his gear—turning him into a ball of fire. Married, with a six-year-old son, Kickasola won a Purple Heart for Vietnam War wounds. This time all he got was months of hospitalization and a long series of skin grafts.

  Injured were thirteen firemen, two police officers and an ambulance attendant, his arm seared by the red-hot air tank on a fireman he and a policeman dragged out of the inferno. “This is something you figure will never happen to you,” the fire chief told me, near tears. A fireman’s helmet, crushed and melted, lay in the street. Another, in worse shape, was found inside the building.

  Officer Lincoln plucked the arsonist out of the crowd, spotting him right away: “He was just standing there.”

  Age eighteen, he had been in trouble since age ten for sniffing glue, transmission fluid and other chemicals. His arrests included attempted rape, burglary, auto theft, prowling and vandalism. Though he lived four blocks north of the fire, the officer saw him stroll up from the south and join the crowd. Green and yellow paint stained his hands. Lincoln knew the teen had been suspected two years earlier of torching his parents’ home. When he approached, the youth became evasive and tried to wipe the paint off his hands. He confessed.

  He had torched the store to cover up a burglary.

  Cops often arrive at fires first, minus the protective gear and training. As fire ravaged a two-story auto-parts center, flames and explosions threatened nearby shops, which were evacuated. Dense smoke filled a tiny cottage on the other side of the burning building. A police sergeant ran through the choking smoke to make sure everyone was out. He was astonished to find three women in the smoke-filled living room—a sixty-year-old heart patient, her sister, fifty-four, and their mother, eighty-seven— “just sitting there … waiting.”

  The frightened women refused to move. The sergeant radioed for help, and Sergeant Doug Rice dashed in the front door, holding a wet cloth over his face.

  The mother, wearing a nightgown and fuzzy pink slippers, insisted that she was not dressed to go out. The two sergeants scooped her up and stumbled to safety through the smoke. They set her down in a leather reclining chair in a furniture store across the street. Other officers brought out her daughters.

  “My mother can’t walk,” the heart patient told me. “We couldn’t get Mother out, and we couldn’t leave her”—she spoke in a matter-of-fact fashion—“so we were going to stay. The smoke was very bad. The explosions were horrible. It sounded like a war.” Then she began to sob.

  That was Miami’s fourth major blaze in a single weekend. Sixty firefighters battled it in midday eighty-plus heat to keep it from spreading. Several were injured, a number treated for smoke inhalation, and the city manager, who came by to watch, wrecked his car as he left. But the women’s home was saved, and so were they.

  Only twice did I ever go home from The Miami Herald so late and so weary that I neglected to fill my car’s gas tank though it was on “E.”

  Never again.

  Major stories broke both nights, and I had to speed off into the dark, on empty.

  I hate that.

  Once it was a plane crash. Next time Stu Kaufman called at nearly four A.M. I knew it was bad when I heard his voice. The toughest one of all: a house fire, in Leisure City, more than forty miles south of Miami, west of Homestead Air Force Base.

  Five dead. All children.

  A summer thunderstorm was raging on the island where I lived. The rain was torrential, and no service stations were open.

  My mind was already racing with everything I would have to do before the Herald’s first-edition deadline, eleven hours away. Hopefully I would find a gas station en route, but they are never there when you need them. I literally screamed in panic all the way, one eye riveted to the gas gauge, the needle flat.

  Never had I driven for so long on empty. Never had I been so lost, for so long, on roads so dark, in the middle of rural South Dade farmland.

  I had no idea where I was. For all I knew, I was speeding in circles. It was almost dawn when I spotted a farmworker and asked directions. The man had no idea where he was, much less where I was going.

  By sunrise I feared that the fire crew would change shifts and go home before I found them. I finally stumbled upon their station and burst in, totally crazed, the needle now way below empty.

  They were tightly wound too, for a reason that put everything back in perspective. The tragedy had been senseless. A ten-dollar smoke detector would have saved five young lives.

  Their father, a big, burly, good-natured construction superintendent who loves children, was awakened by a noise in the night. He arose, walked into the living room and saw the sofa burning. Shouting to his wife to call the fire department, he tried to splash water on the flames. The pan he used melted. He was severely burned and ran out the front door, searching in panic for a garden hose. His wife tried to dial 911, but the telephone was dead. She ran out a utility room door to the backyard for a hose.

  A nineteen-year-old son was awakened by his parents’ screams as they searched in the dark for the garden hose. The dazed teenager, thinking it was time to go to work, sat up and saw an “orange glow from the living room.” He ran to wake his kid brother, age thirteen. When he punched out a window, oxygen collided with built-up gases from the smoldering blaze. The entire room exploded. The blast threw the older boy partially out the window, but it hurled the younger boy and his dog back into the flames.

  A neighbor heard the explosion, saw the fire and tried to reach the children, but the family pets, a bird dog named Whiskers and a boxer named Kane, attacked him. The parents restrained the animals as the neighbor trained his garden hose on the children’s window. The father tried to reenter the house, but the intense heat drove him back. The fire was so hot that the leaves on a hibiscus tree in the front yard withered and blackened.

  The first alarm came from neighbors, logged in at 2:53 A.M. A rescue unit and a pumper roared out of the station one minute later. Firemen could see the fire a mile and a half away, an orange glow below a towering column of smoke. The rescue unit arrived first, and a medic tried to climb in a window. Heat forced him back. The lumbering pumper arrived minutes later, and the crew began to beat down the flames. They arrived four minutes after the first call, but the house was gone in ten minutes.

  I talked to the firefighter who found two dead children, ages five and six, in their bed, “beautiful little blond girls in long nightgowns. One was resting her head on her hands like she was sleeping.” Two baby dolls lay nearby. He carried the girls out. The body of one of them left an eerie outline on her smoke-blackened bedsheet.

  The thirteen-year-old boy died trying to escape. A window screen lay atop his body, in a back bedroom. His hands were cut. His pet dog, a miniature dachshund, lay dead at his feet. The room did not burn—everything in it melted. The two three-year-old girls, two of triplets, died cringing in corners, trying to hide from the flames.

  Firefight
ers groping in the dark missed one of the triplets at first. The fire captain had nine names, and only eight were accounted for. Himself a father of five, he hoped the missing child had escaped, was frightened and hiding safely somewhere, but they found her after forty-five minutes, covered with soot, wedged in a tiny place between a mattress and the wall.

  The parents, the nineteen-year-old son and the surviving triplet, a three-year-old boy, survived. The father was airlifted to a burn center.

  A worn air-conditioner wire had ignited the sofa. The fire may have smoldered for as long as two hours, investigators said, then flames raced across wall paneling and erupted into an inferno.

  Had there been a smoke alarm, investigators estimated, there would have been perhaps ten or fifteen dollars damage, no more than a hundred—and no loss of life. None of the children were burned. All died of smoke inhalation.

  As a result, Stu Kaufman established a smoke-alarm awareness program: Buy One, Get One Free. For each alarm sold, one was donated to a family unable to afford it. This tragedy touched Stu more than all the others. One of the dead girls, age five, had been visiting. From then on, when one of his children spent the night with friends, Stu would always make sure that the household was protected by smoke alarms.

  Some time after, his ten-year-old daughter, already at a slumber party when he arrived home from work, called to say good night. Routinely, he asked about smoke alarms, and she said there were none.

  Stu Kaufman spent the night outside the house in his parked car, on a fire watch.

  You learn a lot covering fires—some things you wish you didn’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been on the beat too long and know too much. I avoid flying when I can, and when I can’t, I wear no synthetics. Fire accompanies most air crashes, and I know that when polyester melts, skin comes off with it. So I wear cotton or wool and Reeboks. If I survive the crash, I can climb out and trudge for help.