Benito Lucio worries that memories of the 10 people killed in a Prairie Township fire a decade ago are as abandoned as the memorial where their apartment building once stood.
“To see the memorial today with weeds, it’s obvious people have forgotten,” Lucio said last week.
Gone are the candles and flower-draped white crosses that honored the 10 people, including three young children, who lost their lives on Sept. 12, 2004.
One of three markers lies broken among tall weeds and uncut grass. A boulder surrounded by a semicircle of pavers is dwarfed by the boarded-up remains of the former Lincoln Park West apartments.
“So many lives gone, just like that,” Lucio said as he stood in front of the memorial. “I can’t help but wonder what would have become of those three little children if things had been different.”
The fire was ruled arson, but the crime has not been solved - a fact that Lucio finds disheartening.
The retired migrant-worker monitor for the state said he would talk about the fire Friday on his local Spanish-language radio show. He wants to encourage anyone with information to come forward.
“People who do bad things are supposed to get punished,” he said. “We can’t rest until that happens in this terrible tragedy.”
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Leads have been few in cracking a case that is more than cold. A $57,000 reward was offered, but Lucio said the money is no longer available.
“The law-enforcement and fire agencies have worked hard on the case, but there’s never been enough evidence to charge anyone,” Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said recently.
A few leads surfaced early on, including a tip that another apartment had been the intended target, said Chris Floyd, a former detective with the Franklin County sheriff’s office. Six weeks before the fatal blaze, three fires were set in the same building, in an empty apartment and a hallway.
A jailhouse informant was released to help investigators but disappeared, so what he had said earlier was then considered unreliable, O’Brien said.
Investigators suspect that members of the Latino community knew more about what happened, but few stepped forward. Both then and now, many are here illegally and fear being deported.
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When emergency responders arrived on the chaotic scene shortly after 2:30 a.m., flames were shooting from the roof and licking the front of the three-story, 24-unit building. The fire in the north stairwell, which served 12 apartments, reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees, making it too hot for firefighters to enter the building.
It had started in a mattress in the stairwell on the first floor, melted the building’s siding and destroyed the roof and third floor. Several people on the top level jumped from windows to escape.
Ismael Noriega-Arenas and his family lived on the third floor. When they opened the door of their apartment, flames rushed in, and the inferno escalated, said Floyd, who is now operations director at the Franklin County coroner’s office. “By all appearances, this was just a family and their kids trying to survive who ended up needlessly dying.”
Noriega-Arenas, 36, lived in the apartment with his wife, Lidia Mejia-Diaz, 24, and their sons: Jose, 6; Antonio, 2; and Ismael Jr., 18 months.
The family had moved from Guanajuato, a city in the state of Leon in central Mexico, to make a better life, Lucio said. The two youngest children were born in the U.S.
Three relatives and two friends shared the apartment. Most of the adults were Mexican immigrants working as landscapers. Mejia-Diaz washed dishes at a nearby Steak ‘n Shake.
All were killed by burns and carbon-monoxide poisoning.
Their families in Mexico shared a $6.5 million settlement in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against the owners and a security firm at Lincoln Park West.
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The building that burned was torn down 11 months after the fire. Prairie Township Fire Chief Stephen Feustel described its construction and limited escape routes as a disaster in the making.
The apartment complex, east of Columbus, never really recovered. But it had been on a downhill slide even before the tragedy.
Once considered a showplace, Lincoln Park West opened in 1965. But the property declined, and crime increased. When developer Tom Fortin took over in 2000, the vacancy rate was 88 percent. To boost occupancy, Fortin welcomed Latino and Somali immigrants who had emigrated to the U.S. for a new life, just as his Sicilian grandparents had done.
“I learned after embracing every culture that we want the same things … such as better education, healthier access to environment and foods, better health care, safer communities, stable jobs, higher self-esteem,” he said recently.
Fortin tried to get the complex annexed to Columbus, but then-Police Chief James G. Jackson said he didn’t have enough officers to patrol the area. Fortin sold his interest in the property in 2002 but said thoughts of the fire victims haunted him two years later.
“I helped pay to have their bodies returned to Mexico for a burial of respect,” he said.
Prairie Township ordered the demolition of 17 buildings after the complex’s owners failed to bring them into compliance with safety and building codes.
“Affordable housing needs to be safe housing - not affordable just because they’ve been neglected,” township Administrator Tracy Hatmaker said.
In April, an affiliate of Utah-based Romney Group, run by Mitt Romney and one of his sons, announced the purchase of the complex, most recently known as Metro West. A spokesman said the plan is to demolish half of the remaining 1,700-plus units and create about 850 luxury town homes.
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Although a task force was created to address concerns raised by the fire and its fallout, anger and distrust remain in the Latino community, said Julia Arbini Carbonell, who was president of the Ohio Hispanic Coalition in 2004.
In the hours and days after the blaze, concerns were raised about language barriers and a lack of cultural understanding between dispatchers, firefighters, relief workers, investigators and Latino residents, she said.
Confusion also surfaced about money raised by businesses, churches, Spanish-language radio stations and other groups and how it would be distributed to victims. In addition to the 10 people who died, dozens were injured, and 58 were displaced from their homes.
“Creating a task force was a way to make it look like something was being done when in reality no one in the group had the authority to make lasting change,” Carbonell said.
Police officers still don’t visit Latino neighborhoods enough to gain trust, she said. And when the police do come, they question Latinos about whether they’re legal residents, even when they’re crime victims.
Since the fire, local fire and police agencies have contracted for round-the-clock bilingual services, but they should work harder to hire or train employees who are fluent in foreign languages, Carbonell said.
Similar problems occurred when a 4-year-old girl drowned three years after the fire. The child’s Spanish-speaking stepfather called 911 after finding her in a pond, but dispatchers could not communicate with him, said Josue Vicente, the president of the Ohio Hispanic Coalition. They were able to get in touch with an interpreter, but the father didn’t understand that help was on its way, and he drove the girl to a hospital, where she died.
Other efforts to assist newcomers are underway. With the help of interpreters, Jaime “Jay” Sierra teaches fire and emergency tips - including basic CPR and what to do if a tornado or other natural disaster strikes - to immigrants from around the world. He is a diversity-education specialist with the Columbus Fire Division.
As a firefighter, he began working as a liaison between the Latino community and the Fire Division in 2002. He started by helping Latinos learn how to call 911, he said.
Sierra said he felt a personal connection to the Prairie Township fire because his parents’ house burned down in 1961, two years before he was born. His mother was traumatized for years.
Partly as a result of the fire, Vicente enrolled in the Franklin County Community Emergency Response Team Program so he could learn to protect his family and his neighbors. The program teaches participants to assist others in the community during an emergency when professional responders aren’t immediately available.
Problems that persist won’t be solved by lawmakers or ballot measures, said Ezra Escudero, who was executive director of the Ohio Commission on Hispanic/Latino Affairs at the time of the fire.
Everyone - including teachers, pastors, social workers, business owners and community groups - should play a part, Escudero said. “These kinds of tragedies have happened before and likely will happen again, but maybe by sharing what we’ve learned, they can happen less often.”
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