More on Problems with the Scene of My Brother’s Truck Fire

This post further considers problems with the scene of my brother’s truck fire.  It examines these two specific issues: why Mark would have been crawling away from the truck on the passenger’s rather than the driver’s side of the vehicle and how articles of Mark’s clothing ended up burning about sixty feet from the truck.

It is difficult to believe that Mark tried to escape from his burning truck on the passenger’s side, since only the driver’s side door was found open.  If, as the New York State Police investigators insisted, my brother had backed his truck down the driveway and parked it in the field, surely once the truck burst into flames, he would have quickly tried to get as far away from the vehicle as possible.  He would not have gone around the truck to the passenger’s side but would have proceeded away from the truck directly opposite the driver’s door, especially to avoid injury from an explosion potentially caused by the gas can inside the truck (on the suspicious circumstances of the gas can in the cab of the truck, see esp. post of October 30, 2018).

Furthermore, Mark was on fire himself when he was discovered, first by his wife Susan, then by neighbor and EMT Cheryl Simcox, and finally by the three firefighters Gary Wind, Mark Ward, and Wayne Frank, all within a period of a few minutes.  (See the witness statements of the first four. Oddly, Wayne was not asked to give a witness statement, but told me orally that he had helped to put the flames out on Mark.)  Since Cheryl Simcox’s house faces the field on Cross Rd., which intersects Whalen Rd. close to Mark’s house, she was able to get there within a couple of minutes.  The photo below, showing Whalen Road and the field from the front of Mark’s property to the intersection of Cross Road, with Cheryl Simcox’s house (set back) on the far right, indicates how close she was to the scene of the fire.

As Cheryl informed me, there were two-foot flames shooting from Mark’s body when she rushed to the scene almost immediately after she heard Kill Buck VFD being toned out at 10:55 p.m. for a vehicle fire on Whalen Road.  My brother’s burns were so severe that his attending physician at the burn unit of the Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, Dr. Edward Piotrowski, exclaimed that he had never seen anyone come with such severe burns and wondered how that could have happened.  According to the doctor, Mark’s burns covered close to 90% of his body; almost all were third degree, with even some fourth degree, which he referred to as “charring.”  As that experienced burn specialist stated, even if Mark had caused a fire by lighting a cigarette with an open gas can in the truck, it still would not have saturated him with gasoline and caused such severe burns.  In his view, gasoline had to have been poured over Mark’s body.

Articles of Mark’s clothing observed burning about sixty feet from the truck also suggest that he was not in the truck when the fire started.  In his witness statement, Gary Wind refers to observing “two small spots” on fire about 60 feet from the truck; he later confirmed orally that the two spots were Mark’s clothes burning close to where he lay (see posts of February 2, 2012, and May 31, 2019).  My brother presumably had tried to save himself by pulling at least some of his burning clothes off.  In her witness statement, Mark’s wife Susan says that after rushing out of the house, she saw Mark crawling away from the truck and tried to bat the flames out on him with her white sweatshirt (on the issue of the lack of burn marks on that white sweatshirt, see esp. post of November 30, 2018) but mentions nothing about seeing any clothes on fire near Mark’s body.

Susan apparently did not leave the scene but was standing at the end of the driveway when Cheryl arrived.  At that point my brother had two-foot flames shooting from his entire body, and Cheryl informed me that Mark was lying on the ground and not moving.  Since the two small piles of burning clothes were about sixty feet from the truck, my brother couldn’t have been just crawling from the truck when he presumably threw them off.  So when did Mark pull those clothes off?

The New York State Police investigators should have tried to resolve the underlying discrepancy between Gary Wind’s and Susan’s statements in order to clarify the issue of Mark’s clothing burning on the ground so far from the truck and to find out what really happened that night.  Did they even bother to ask Gary Wind what those two “spots” on fire were?