Mark's Gasoline-Soaked Clothing

This post considers the extent to which my brother was saturated with gasoline.  As Dr. Edward Piotrowski, Mark’s attending physician at the burn unit of the Erie County Medical Center, mentioned to me in a phone conversation, he could not understand how my brother could have come in with such severe burns (third degree over nearly 90% of his body) and indicated that he had been saturated with a flammable substance.  In an entry for September 24, 2003, of his narrative in the police report on Mark’s death, N. Y. S. P. Inv. Edward Kalfas notes that “portions of burnt clothing from the victim” were sent to the Western Regional Crime Lab in Albany.  An entry for November 4, 2003, states that the melted gasoline can found on the passenger’s side floor of Mark’s truck and the burnt clothing “tested positive for gasoline.”

An earlier post (February 2, 2012) raised the issue of what clothing specifically is meant.  It suggested that Mark's underpants were the likely item, since a neighbor of Mark’s named Dan Smith had told me that when he rushed to the scene, all my brother's clothes had been burned off except for his underpants.  In addition, in his witness statement Gary Wind, the first firefighter on the scene, refers to Mark lying on the ground with “almost all his clothing burned off” and mentions two small spots close to where Mark lay burning in the field.  In a meeting with me in 2012, Wind, then Salamanca police chief, clarified his reference to those spots by revealing that they were in fact some of Mark’s clothing, which he had presumably removed from his burning body.

No actual clarification about the specific clothing tested for gasoline was revealed to me until Capt. Steven Nigrelli mentioned in a phone conversation in 2014 that the items consisted of Mark’s shoes (presumably the boot-style shoes that my brother regularly wore) and burnt pieces of clothing, specifically from his jeans.  The police investigators adamantly insisted that my brother was in the driver’s seat of the truck when the fire started and that he himself caused the fire by spilling gasoline from the can on himself, either accidentally or deliberately, and then by lighting a match or a cigarette lighter.  Yet how, then, did Mark get a significant amount of gasoline on his shoes?  If he was sitting in the driver’s seat, his legs presumably would have been stretched out, and it would have been highly unlikely that his shoes, or boots, would have been received any splash from spilled gasoline.

How much gasoline had actually been in that melted red plastic can?  When Atty. Michael Kelly asked about the gas can in his meeting with Inv. Kalfas and Sr. Inv. Wolfe in 2005, Kalfas told Kelly that Susan stated she had bought the can of gas and at the time of the fire it was half-full because she had used it for mowing the lawn.  There was presumably enough to be poured on Mark’s head, given what his attending physician told me about the severity of the burns to his head (see post of November 1, 2012).  Yet my brother obviously would not have easily poured gasoline on his head if he sat inside his truck.  But, then, Mark had no reason to have put a gas can into his truck late that night, in spite of his wife’s claim in her witness statement that she “realized that Mark had taken a plastic 5 gal. can of gas out of the garage.”  The truck’s tank, as the fire investigator’s report makes clear, was three-quarters full.

The shoes that tested positive for gasoline are but one more indication of how poorly the New York State Police investigators thought through the evidence in the case of my brother’s death.