By Jennifre Myers
The Lowell Sun
LOWELL, Mass. — The sky above the city was red.
When the second alarm was struck, Engine 4 peeled out of the High Street fire station, sirens wailing. It was just after 1 a.m. on March 5, 1982, and the firefighters headed toward the Acre knew they were in for a long night. Minutes later, they pulled up to an inferno engulfing a Decatur Street tenement in the shadow of St. Jean-Baptiste Church.
“The building was going like a son of a gun,” recalled Lowell Fire Department Deputy Chief Patrick McCabe, then a 29-year-old captain. “Our orders from the deputy on the scene were to prepare to go in and search for people in the building.”
The heavy fire had been knocked down and most of the smoke cleared when McCabe and then-Chief John Mulligan shined their flashlights into the first-floor bedroom.
There were two twin beds. A child appeared to be sleeping in one of them. Slumped on the floor next to the bed were a woman with an infant in one arm and a small child in the other. All four were dead, victims of smoke inhalation.
“I had never seen anything like it before or since,” McCabe said last week. “To see a whole family dropped right there . . . the kids looked like they never even woke up.”
Lowell Police Arson Investigator Harold Waterhouse arrived on the scene at 2:30 a.m. The fire had hit five alarms.
“They were hollering that there were people trapped inside,” said Waterhouse, 81, who retired in 1989. “We went into the side door and in the rear stairway headed up to the third floor we saw people buried in debris who had been trying to escape.”
Firefighter John Diaz, 27, who had been on the job three years, told The Sun at the time it was his first experience seeing dead bodies.
“I brought the baby (6-month-old Jose Luis Cortes) out in my arms and tried CPR, but it was dead,” he said.
Diaz spent the next several hours acting as a Spanish translator in the heavily Hispanic neighborhood, gathering information including the names of the victims. A neighbor brought him the report card of one of the dead children.
The three-story, nine-apartment, wood-framed tenement at 32-36 Decatur St. was home to 28 people; that night it became a tomb for eight. Three adults and five children perished in the city’s deadliest fire. The building did not have smoke detectors.
Discovered lifeless in the first floor bedroom were Adelaida Ferrer, 35, who had left Puerto Rico six months earlier in search of a better life for her sons: Javier Colon, 5, Augustine Colon, 4, and Joel Colon, 1 1/2. The family killed while attempting to escape from the third floor were Efrain Cortes, 21, his wife Nancy Velasquez, 18, and their two sons Efrain, 2 and Jose Luis, 6 months.
“As we were searching the back hallway we heard what we thought was a baby crying,” recalled McCabe. “It was a cat. We saved the cat. At that point we were just so desperate to find someone alive that in our minds the cat’s cries sounded like a baby.”
The McDonough Funeral Home picked up the tab for the funeral services. St. Patrick’s Cemetery donated plots for Adelaida
Ferrer and her sons. The Cortes family was buried in Puerto Rico.
It has been 30 years
“Nobody who was there will ever forget that night,” Waterhouse said. “I saw babies floating in water, what a horrible sight. It is one thing to lose adults, but another to lose children.”
What caused the tragedy?
McCabe said he first thought the building must be vacant because it was burning so furiously. The city’s ample stock of vacant buildings in the early 1980s provided easy kindling; those blazes burned hot and fast due to the amount of oxygen allowed into the largely windowless structures.
“There were a lot of suspicious fires at that time across the city,” said Waterhouse. “We were out there on the job three times a week.”
To Waterhouse, who established the Arson Squad in 1975, the fast-moving fire led him to suspect arson.
“It was a raging fire before the first firetruck was there,” he said. “Such a fast-moving fire is unusual.”
Waterhouse said the first step in any fire investigation is to eliminate accidental causes; then the investigator looks at the burn patterns left on the building’s charred remains. He said the V-shaped burn patterns, coupled with glass remnants consistent with bottles used to produce Molotov cocktails, and that the fire had two points of origin, convinced him this blaze was no accident.
“If this theory proves true, what are we dealing with?” then-Assistant City Manager James Campbell asked at the time. “A killer. Absolutely a savage killer.”
Residents and city officials clamored for swift justice.
“I remember the big, huge banner headlines, the outrage, and the big press conference the next day at City Hall when the police chief and fire chief said they would get who was responsible,” said Boston Herald sportswriter Karen Guregian, who in 1982 was a 21-year-old co-op student from Northeastern University working the police beat at The Sun, writing much of the coverage of the fire and its aftermath. “People in the city were screaming for justice for the innocent lives lost, especially the children. It appeared to be arson resulting from a drug deal gone bad.”
Arson probe catches a break
Waterhouse said then-Acting Police Chief John Sheehan assigned every department, from Vice to Major Case, to the investigation. He and his partner Lt. William Gilligan worked through the day Friday. On Saturday night they caught a break. A guy named “Ed” had seen one of the perpetrators, an informant said.
Waterhouse and Gilligan tracked down neighborhood resident Ed Evans, who told them he had clearly seen one of three men in front of the house right before the blaze erupted because he was bathed in the glow of the streetlight. Waterhouse said Evans picked a photo of Victor Rosario, 24, out of a batch of photos of Hispanic men and said he saw him throw a Molotov cocktail into the building.
Rosario was taken into custody and interviewed by police, with the assistance of a translator, all night. By 5 a.m. on Sunday, March 7, Rosario signed a confession.
He said he watched brothers Felix and Edgardo Garcia, 19, fill 12-ounce Miller beer bottles with flammable liquid and rags in the basement of 38 Branch St. where Rosario and Felix Garcia, 31, lived. The trio spent the day drinking beer and rum, then went to the Laconia Lounge on Merrimack Street for more drinks before heading to Decatur Street to “get Efrain Cortes over drugs.”
Sources told The Sun at the time the motive for the arson was a “rip-off” of $5,000 to $7,000 in heroin.
In his signed affidavit, Rosario wrote: “Felix threw one Molotov through the kitchen window and Gardo threw one through a front window. I had the third Molotov and threw mine in the front hall.”
All three men were arrested and arraigned on eight counts of murder and one count of arson in Lowell District Court on March 8, 1982. All pleaded not guilty. A month later the Garcia brothers were released when Rosario refused to testify against them at a probable-cause hearing.
The brothers returned to Puerto Rico and both have since died.
During his March 1983 trial, Rosario said he and the Garcia brothers were buying $50 in heroin and $50 in cocaine from Daniella “Tata” Martinez at 44 Decatur St. when the fire broke out.
He said he did not remember confessing; his defense attorney, John Campbell, asserted Rosario was psychotic during the interrogation and did not know what he was saying.
After six days of testimony and eight hours of deliberation, the six-man, six-woman jury found Rosario guilty of eight counts of second-degree murder and one count of arson on March 28, 1983. He was sentenced to life in prison.
New scrutiny of the case
A June 2010 New England Center for Investigative Reporting story, written for The Boston Globe, cast doubt on Rosario’s guilt.
Arson experts who reviewed the case file for the NECIR questioned the work of Waterhouse and his team, stating their conclusions of arson were based on what is now considered “junk science.” They pointed out no accelerant was found on glass tested from the scene.
Waterhouse stands by the police work.
He said he and his team sifted through three barrels full of glass from the scene and sent samples to the FBI lab.
“They were unable to find any flammable liquid, but that is not unusual,” Waterhouse said. “In a major fire the fuel will burn off. Maybe they do look at fires differently today, but we did our job thoroughly and I have my reputation to back that up.”
From 1975 to 1989, Waterhouse investigated 5,000 fires, leading to more than 500 arrests.
Additionally, Ramon Nieves, who acted as the interpreter at Rosario’s interrogation, now says Rosario appeared to have been hallucinating during the interview. A forensic scientist hired by Rosario’s new legal team theorizes that Rosario, a drug addict and alcoholic, may have been suffering from withdrawal symptoms and unaware of what he was saying when he confessed.
The NECIR story stated Rosario’s new lawyers, Esther Horwich and Andrea Petersen of Boston, said they were going to file a motion in an attempt to reopen the case. Middlesex District Attorney’s office spokeswoman Jessica Pastore said last week that no such motion has been filed.
Rosario married the teacher who taught him to read in prison, leads Bible study classes and has been ordained as a minister, according to the 2010 story.
The Parole Board has denied Rosario his freedom every five years since he was convicted in 1983. In 1998, the state Appeals Board denied Rosario a new trial and a further appeal was later denied. He is up for parole again this year; Pastore said a hearing date has not yet been set.
“I get angry when people like The Globe are trying to free a scumbag,” Waterhouse said. “I don’t think he should be let out, he’s dangerous. Why let him out now — because he became a minister? He’s play-acting. If you are so good, why did you kill eight people? It was all about drugs.”
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