The previous post (November 12, 2022) discussed the N.Y.S.P. investigators’ refusal to acknowledge that my brother had been saturated with gasoline or that the burns were very severe virtually all over his body, in contrast to statements made to me and to a nephew by Mark’s attending physician at the burn unit and later confirmed by an experienced forensic toxicologist. As reported in an earlier post (May 31, 2019), an entry of the principal investigator Inv. Edward Kalfas’s narrative in the police report for September 24, 2003, records that “portions of burnt clothing from the victim” were sent to the Western Regional Crime Lab in Albany, and one for November 4, 2003, records that the clothing “tested positive for gasoline.”
The N.Y.S.P. investigators said virtually nothing about the condition of Mark’s clothes. In Atty. Michael Kelly’s summary of his conversations with the N.Y.S.P. investigators and in my own conversations with those officials, no reference was made to the fact that Mark’s clothes had tested positive for gasoline. As the post of May 2019 observes, it was not until 2014 that I learned from Capt. Steven Nigrelli even that the specific items tested were Mark’s shoes and his jeans.
The silence of the N.Y.S.P. investigators about the presence of some of Mark’s clothes on the scene and the location of those clothes is troubling. Since the first firefighter on the scene of Mark’s truck fire observed clothing close to where he lay, about sixty feet away from his burning truck, my brother must have pulled some of his clothes off in order to put the flames out. As the forensic toxicologist mentioned above pointed out, even if a burn victim who has been doused with gasoline pulls off his clothes to put the fire out, the skin continues to burn, which explains why Mark’s burns were so severe over almost all of his body.
In fact, Mark continued to burn horribly after taking off the clothes discovered lying near him, as observed by the first emergency worker on the scene. That individual, an EMT and nearby neighbor, told me that there were two-foot flames shooting from Mark’s entire body when she arrived and saw him lying in the field (see post of October 31, 2019). The eye-witness report of Mark’s burning body thus supports the informed professional statements of the forensic toxicologist. Mark had obviously been doused with a considerable amount of gasoline, which soaked through his clothing onto his skin.
But where was my brother actually doused with the gasoline? The N.Y.S.P. investigators insisted that my brother was in the driver’s seat of the truck when the fire started and that he caused the fire himself either by accidentally spilling or, more likely, deliberately pouring gasoline from the gas can, which was found on the floor of the passenger’s side of the truck. But Mark’s horribly burning body lying sixty feet from his truck, with some of his clothes nearby, contradicts that position.
For one, a person cannot end up with 90% of his body soaked with gasoline by an accidental, or even deliberate, spill of a gas can while sitting in the narrow, confined space of a traditional pickup truck. More important, there was no fire trail leading from the truck to where Mark was found (see post of June 26, 2011). How could the N.Y.S.P. investigators have simply ignored the absence of a fire trail and merely assumed that Mark had actually crawled through the field from the truck?
An independent criminologist thought that after being attacked in his driveway and put in the truck, my brother jumped out of the truck and ran for his life in the field. Mark then must have been apprehended and doused with gasoline and set on fire close to where he was found, sixty feet from the truck, and gasoline must have been poured separately on the driver’s seat of the truck, where the truck fire originated (see the fire investigator’s report on the saturation of the driver’s seat area).
My brother had to be the victim of foul play, not of his own carelessness. By virtually ignoring Mark’s gasoline-soaked clothes as well as the pool of his blood found in his driveway, the observed wounds to his forehead and left side of his face, and the suspicious placement of the gas can inside the truck where my brother never put gas cans, the N.Y.S.P. investigators made sure that they would not solve my brother’s death.
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