The Two Problematic Phone Calls

This post considers the problem of both an alleged phone call and the 911 call in the investigation into the suspicious truck fire that claimed my brother Mark’s life.  It follows on the previous post (June 30, 2018), which raised concerns about the 911 call made by my brother’s wife Susan and also questioned the lack of any reference to a 911 call in the police report on Salamanca pharmacist Dale Tarapacki’s death in a similarly suspicious truck fire.

After assessing the police report, the fire investigator’s report, the autopsy report, and information gathered by me from individuals who were on the scene of Mark’s truck fire, attorney Michael Kelly thought it looked like a murder to him and wanted to get the investigation re-opened. He asked the N.Y. State Police investigators to review some of the evidence, including the 911 call, and to obtain the records for an alleged phone call between my brother’s wife and an acquaintance of Mark’s immediately prior to the truck fire.  As previously indicated (see posts of September 22, 2011, and June 30, 2018), senior investigator John Wolfe initially agreed but then changed his mind and refused to review the 911 call.  He also refused to check the records of the phone call Mark’s wife Susan and Pete Rapacioli claimed to have made for nearly half an hour just before my brother’s truck burst into flames in the field across from their house about 11 p.m. (on that call, see posts of December 27, 2012; May 15, 2013, April 19 and July 1, 2014; and October 25, 2016).

It is very unfortunate that the records for that alleged telephone call were not obtained and a review of the 911 call was not done, especially since further inconsistencies between the police report and other information relayed to me have come to light.  Pete Rapacioli telephoned me unexpectedly to complain that I had mentioned him in a post on the alleged phone call (see posts of May 15 and June 26, 2013).  According to Rapacioli, while he was on the phone with Susan, she told him that she “saw an orange glow in the distance” and was going to call 911.  Rapacioli insisted that he had not found out about Mark until the next day.  Here is what Susan, who mentions that she was on the phone at that time, says in her witness statement in the police report: “I saw fire out the front window of our house and after taking a closer look, I could see Mark’s truck across the street from our driveway on fire. I immediately called 911 and then I went out to the fire.  I saw Mark crawling away from the truck and I tried to put the flames on him out. I asked him what did you do [sic] and he said, ‘I did nothing.’”

Rather than referring to “an orange glow in the distance,” Susan clearly states that she saw a fire from the front window and quite quickly knew it was Mark’s truck across the street just before she called 911.  At any rate, one would presumably not rush to call 911 at the sight of a distant orange glow. Earlier posts have dealt with problems underlying Susan’s claim to have tried to dash the flames out on Mark (see September 22, 2010, and September 22, 2012) and with the issue of Mark’s ability to speak in the catastrophic condition of third-degree burns over virtually all of his body (see November 30, 2011). 

Furthermore, as mentioned in the immediately preceding post, an individual who heard the 911 tape not long after Mark’s truck fire referred to being troubled by the level of concern for Mark expressed by Susan in that 911 call.  According to my source, Susan also took quite a while in that same call before getting to the point about the truck fire.  Thus, there are important discrepancies between the account of my source and Susan’s account with respect to her interest in helping Mark and the time frame of her 911 call.  When specifically did she know that Mark had been so seriously burned?  Was it before or after she made the 911 call?

The failure of the N.Y. State Police investigators (a) to verify the existence and timing of the alleged phone call and its content and (b) to re-examine the 911 call seems to have been part of a pattern aimed at not finding out the truth about how my brother came to be burned to death.  Let us not forget that the investigators ignored the pool of Mark’s blood discovered that night right in the area where he normally parked his truck and discounted the wound on Mark’s forehead observed by his attending physician at the burn unit and by firefighter Wayne Frank when it was brought to their attention (see posts of September 22, 2010; May 29 and September 22, 2012).

Let us not forget that the investigators did nothing to determine (or rule out) a potential involvement in Mark’s death by Salamanca police officer Mark Marowski, who got into a personal argument with my brother the very day before the truck fire and then called in to have him arrested for DWI (see esp. posts of September 14 and October 17, 2014).  Let us also recall that, according to an anonymous letter sent to my home, my brother’s wife and Ofc. Marowski were having an affair (see post of August 11, 2014).  Is it merely coincidental that Pete Rapacioli’s son-in-law is the brother of a veteran Salamanca police officer (see post of December 24, 2013)?  Or was “the blue wall of silence” in full force?