How Did a False Claim Originate?

Today would have been my brother’s sixty-third birthday, but his life was taken away at age fifty-three under circumstances that must make any civilized person ponder the depths of human cruelty.  Nearly ten years have passed since that suspicious truck fire, yet there is still no justice for Mark.

This post considers how the claim originated that the fire started when Mark was pouring gasoline into his tank because his truck had run out of gas.  That explanation for my brother’s extremely severe, fatal burns was unsettling to me in the days and weeks following his truck fire.  For one, it did not seem plausible that Mark would have run out of gas in the field right across from his driveway, and as I observed from the scorched earth on the day of his funeral, the truck had been well into that field, about fifty feet or so.  Second, his friend Alexis Wright told me in December 2003 not to believe any report that the truck had run out of gas because she knew from Mark himself that he never let the tank go below half-full.  Third, when it became known that there was a gas can on the passenger’s side floor of Mark’s truck, Alexis Wright mentioned that Mark had actually stated that he put gas cans only in the back of the truck and never in the cab, and numerous other friends of his made similar statements.  The claim about Mark pouring gas into his tank in that field around 11 p.m. then made even less sense.  Recently, a man from Salamanca with whom I had not had any contact for many years told me that he had been very surprised to hear that my brother had been accidentally burned to death because “Mark was not a careless person.”

During the investigation, Inv. Kalfas stated that my brother’s truck had not run out of gas and that he had not been putting gasoline into the tank when the fire started.  That fact was definitively confirmed by the fire investigator’s report, which I obtained through a FOIL request in 2004: the report states clearly that the tank was three-quarters full.  So why did that misinformation persist in the months after Mark’s death?

To my surprise, the issue of Mark putting gasoline into the tank came up recently in my conversation with Pete Rapacioli, who called to express his dissatisfaction at being mentioned in this blog (see June 26, 2013).  In referring to his phone call with Mark’s wife just before the fire, Rapacioli stated that Susan had told him she had to hang up to call 911 about an “orange glow” in the distance and that he had not found out that it was Mark until the next day.  He added that he then was told that Mark had been putting gasoline into the tank while smoking.  I asked Rapacioli who had told him that because it couldn’t possibly be true, and I referred to the fire investigator’s report.  He replied that “many people” had said that about the cause of the fire.

It seems very odd that at this point Rapacioli would still think that Mark had got so badly burned while putting gasoline into the tank of his truck.  During the phone call with me in June, Rapacioli kept insisting that Mark had been his friend.  Yet he apparently had not made any effort to learn what had actually happened that night.  I can’t say how many people at the time of the truck fire may have thought that my brother had been pouring gas into his tank when he got burned.  But no one I’m aware of believed it by the end of the police investigation.

Some time ago, I raised concerns in this blog about specific comments on this issue that were made immediately after Mark’s death and were reported to me.  A previous post (September 22, 2012) refers to a statement by Susan to my half-sister Carol McKenna at the burn unit the morning after the fire that Mark had been putting gasoline into the tank, which had run out of gas, when he got burned.  As mentioned in the earlier post, Carol reported that information to Inv. Kalfas.  Within a day or so after my brother died, Mark’s and Susan’s son Brian also told my cousin Dennis Pavlock that the truck had run out of gas (see posts of July 22 and September 22, 2012).  As Dennis informed me, when Brian called to ask him to be a pall bearer, he explained that Mark had been putting gas into the tank when the fire started.  In addition, in a later conversation with me, one other person mentioned being told the same thing about the gas right after my brother’s death.

The police report makes no mention by anyone during the investigation that Mark had been putting gasoline into the tank when the fire started.  Susan says nothing about that in her witness statement, which was taken that night at 11:30, yet she made that claim to Carol McKenna the following morning.  Is it possible that in the interval Susan might have spoken to someone who had been on or near the scene at the time of the fire and claimed to have seen something?