What Was Said about the Gas Can

The gas can discovered on the passenger’s side floor of my brother’s burning pick-up truck should have been considered a suspicious element in Mark’s death.  However, the NYSP investigators never appeared to question why Mark’s truck would have been backed down his driveway and parked fifty feet into the field across the road from his house around 11:30 p.m. with a gas can in the cab.  They simply assumed that Mark was responsible for the bizarre location of his truck and the gas can in the cab, and they did not consider any other possibility (see most recently post of October 31, 2025).

Even though he had no evidence that Mark would have taken his own life, NYSP Inv. Edward Kalfas insisted from very early on in the investigation that my brother’s death looked like a suicide.  For Kalfas, then, Mark had put the gas can in the cab to end his life.

The only apparent reference in the police report to Mark with a gas can the night of the truck fire occurs in the witness statement of Mark’s wife Susan, which was taken between 11:30 and 11:45 the night of the fire.  Here is her statement: “After the fire, I realized that Mark had taken a plastic 5 gal. can of gas out of the garage but I don’t know what he did with it.”  (On the issue of general knowledge about the presence of a gas can in the truck before the arrival of the fire investigation team at 11:30, see posts of October 30, 2018, and October 31, 2025.)

A reference to the gas can, according to Mark’s and my cousin Dennis Pavlock, was made by Mark’s and Susan’s son Brian, who telephoned Dennis to ask him to be a pallbearer at Mark’s funeral.  Dennis informed me that Brian explained to him that Mark had taken a gas can to the truck, which had run out of gas, and had got burned.  Dennis was concerned when he later learned that the truck had not run out of gas and that the tank was almost full.

Since Brian was away at school the night of the fire, it is difficult to understand how he got that unfounded explanation for what had happened with the gas can.  It is not clear from the redacted copy of the police report (sent by the NYSP in response to my FOIL request) if Brian was interviewed by Inv. Kalfas (his sister Christie definitely was: see posts of November 23, 2013, and January 31, 2018).  So it is not possible to know if he reiterated to Kalfas what he reportedly told Dennis.

At any rate, Kalfas was clearly aware of Susan’s reference to Mark taking a gas can from the garage.  He presumably had carefully read Susan’s entire witness statement, which was taken by NYSP Trooper David Chandler.  Kalfas, then, would have been aware of her account of rushing to the scene of the truck fire: there, according to Susan, she asked Mark, “What did you do?”, and he replied, “I did nothing.”  Kalfas also records in his own subsequent interviews of Mark’s wife (10/25/03 and 12/12/03) that she repeated what she had said the night of the fire.

Did Kalfas not consider the implications of Mark’s reply “I did nothing,” as recorded by Susan?  Those words certainly indicate that Mark did not take a gas can to his truck to commit suicide and did not spill gas on himself in his truck or anywhere else.  It appears that Kalfas accepted Susan’s statement about “realizing” that Mark had taken a gas can out of the garage but essentially ignored her statement that Mark, on fire, had told her, “I did nothing.”

Inv. Kalfas’s failure to consider more closely the problem of that gas can in the cab of Mark’s truck is connected with his rush to judgment about Mark’s death as a suicide.  (There will be more on the problem of the gas can in the cab of Mark’s truck in an upcoming post.)  But as, for instance, with the pool of Mark’s blood found where he usually parked his truck and the wound on his forehead noticed by two firefighters and by the attending physician at the burn unit, the NYSP investigation left too much unexamined and unanswered.