The Problematic Assumption that Mark Put a Gas Can in the Cab of His Truck

Previous posts (see July 22, 2012, and October 30, 2018) have brought up the problem that a gas can was found on the passenger’s side floor of my brother’s burning truck.  Since Mark put gas cans only in the back and never in the cab of his truck (see posts of September 22, 2010, and August 11, 2014), it is highly improbable that he put that gas can in the cab.  Yet the New York State Police insisted that Mark must have put it there and then spilled gasoline on himself, either inadvertently in a state of intoxication or deliberately in an effort to commit suicide.  Other posts have countered these claims by the State Police (see February 2 and July 22, 2012).  This post examines what was reported about the gas can on the scene of the truck fire and shortly afterwards.

Firefighter Mark Ward (also, as then superintendent of the Salamanca school system, the boss of my brother’s wife Susan and a close personal friend of hers) mentions in his witness statement that my brother had said the words “gasoline can” twice on the scene.  In his own witness statement, firefighter Gary Wind says that he heard my brother utter “something about gas,” but acknowledges that he “couldn’t make out anything he [my brother Mark] was saying.”  The State Police may well have taken Ward’s statement to imply that my brother was referring to using the gas can.  However, in her witness statement, Susan says that when she rushed to the scene, she asked Mark, “What did you do?” and that he replied, “I did nothing.”  Those words would suggest that Mark had not caused the fire by pouring gas into the tank or spilling it in the truck.  Otherwise, wouldn’t he have said something like “It was an accident,” or “I was putting gas in the truck”?

In her witness statement, Susan also mentions that shortly before the fire she heard a noise in the garage, which she thought was from the cats, but later adds, “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.”  Early the next morning at the burn unit of the Erie County Medical Center, according to Carol McKenna, who is Mark’s and my half-sister, Susan told her that my brother had been putting gasoline in the truck and had got burned.  According to Carol’s son Tom, Susan told him at the burn unit that Mark had been putting gasoline into the tank with a cigarette hanging from his mouth when the fire started.

According to Mark’s and my cousin Dennis Pavlock, who was contacted about being a pallbearer at Mark’s funeral, Mark and Susan’s son Brian also told him that his father (whom he referred to as “Mark”) had been pouring gasoline into the tank when the fire started.  Brian, however, was apparently not at home, but away at school, at the time of the truck fire.  So Brian would not have had first-hand knowledge of what had happened.  Not long after, according to a long-time friend of Mark's and Susan's, Susan said that she had seen Mark carrying gas cans to the truck.

The three statements that Susan reportedly made about Mark putting gas into the tank or carrying a gas can (or cans) to the truck suggest that she may have seen someone with the gas can walking toward the truck or standing beside it.  But when the fire occurred around 11 p.m, the truck was fifty feet into the field across from their house, and the driveway leading from their attached garage to the street is about 100 feet long.  In addition, there would not have been substantial public street lighting on rural Whalen Road.  Under such circumstances, could a person accurately identify a man standing at or near Mark’s truck in the distance?