By Allyson Bird
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
Copyright 2006 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — It’s a tossup who was surprised more by a Friday night fire on North 14th Street: the people at home who smelled it in the vents, or the firefighters who realized how it got there.
Police arrested a 16-year-old St. Lucie County Fire District Explorer on arson charges, Fire District Capt. Derek Foxx said.
No one was injured in the blaze, which happened about 10 p.m.
Foxx said investigators believe the teenager set the fire by putting a flammable liquid on a mattress in a first-floor closet.
“We don’t know if it was a case of wanting to get some attention, wanting to be a hero,” Foxx said.
Police also charged the teen, who lives nearby, with making a false fire report. Foxx said the teen called two hours before the real blaze to report a bogus one at another address.
“Dispatch picked up on the fact that the voices were the same,” the captain said.
The fire caused an estimated $1,000 in damage to a $65,000 home, Foxx said.
Astrel Alperis, 43, who moved to Fort Pierce from Haiti about seven months ago, said his 8-year-old son, Stanley Noel, smelled smoke while taking a shower.
Alperis and six family members live on the second floor of the lime-green home. The flames were on the home’s first floor, where no one lives.
As a postal worker drove up to the home Saturday afternoon, he sniffed the air and yelled upstairs to ask Alperis: “Was there a fire here?”
Alperis shook his head. “I don’t understand this.”
Looking at the charred walls below, he said, “I’m so lucky there was no breeze. If there was a breeze, I would’ve lost all my stuff.”