Prison for Owner of Las Vegas Motel Where Fire Killed Six
Las Vegas Review-Journal
(TNS)
A judge ordered prison time Tuesday for the former owner of a dilapidated motel where the deadliest residential fire in Las Vegas city history occurred.
“I think you consistently put profit over people and people died because of that,” District Judge Jacqueline Bluth told Adolfo Orozco.
She then sentenced him to spend 19 to 48 months behind bars.
The fire at the Alpine Motel Apartments in 2019 killed six and injured 13.
Orozco pleaded guilty in January to two counts of involuntary manslaughter and a count of performance of an act or neglect of duty in willful or wanton disregard of safety of persons or property resulting in substantial bodily harm and death. The plea was an Alford plea, meaning he only admitted prosecutors had the evidence to convict him.
Prosecutors have said Orozco acted like a “slumlord” in his failure to maintain the property leading up to the 2019 fire. Defense attorneys argued others shared responsibility and that Orozco was not aware of issues such as a bolted back door and a hallway obstructed with refrigerators.
Bluth said tenants testified at Orozco’s preliminary hearing that their bathrooms lacked ceilings or the ceilings were coming down, that they used stoves and ovens to survive the winter because there was no working heat and that apartments were “completely infested with bedbugs, cockroaches” and had doors that wouldn’t shut. The second and third floor hallways didn’t have lighting, she said, and electrical outlets didn’t work or sparked when a tenant tried to use them.
The prosecution and defense agreed it was a tenant’s unattended stove, used to heat his unit, that started the fire.
“I do not think that you are a malicious human,” Bluth told Orozco. “I don’t think that you wanted people to get hurt or you wanted people to die. But I do absolutely think you knew how bad and how dangerous things were at that place. I think those individuals were living in complete squalor.”
The judge did not order Orozco to be taken into custody immediately. Although she said she was concerned he might be “a flight risk,” she gave him 90 days to retain property management before he begins serving his sentence.
Fire code violations
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported after the fire that the building was plagued by fire code violations, including a back door that was bolted and kept residents from getting out. The building, which lacked a functioning sprinkler system and working fire alarms, had not received a city fire inspection for nearly three years before the blaze, even though it had a history of failed inspections.
In Orozco’s sentencing memorandum, defense attorneys said the Alpine was not required to have sprinklers because of its age and that Orozco generally fixed issues.
Lawyers Dominic Gentile and Gia Marina said Orozco owned and operated 30 low-income properties with more than 440 rooms when the fire occurred.
“He was responsible for the safety of people and property located in them, for sure,” they wrote. “He needed to exercise reasonable care to ensure that safety, for sure. But there was no way that anyone could accomplish that by themselves. Thus, he needed to delegate and depend upon others — resident managers, tenants, service providers and vendors.”
The attorneys argued some of those people “contributed to the disaster.”
“This man does not belong in prison,” said Gentile. “It’s not going to do him any good. He’s not the kind of a person that should be put in prison. It’s going to bring nobody back to life.”
The defense attorney said Orozco, who was born in Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. at age 15, has lived a model life and has “never been in any kind of trouble.”
The Review-Journal previously reported that records indicated Orozco and his properties were involved in a Homeland Security investigation looking into guns, money laundering and drugs tied to the Mexican Mafia and cartels.
Gentile said nothing came of the investigation. The Homeland Security Department did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
‘Why was there no heat?’
Chief Deputy District Attorney John Giordani showed the court photos of the charred and smoke-covered bodies of people killed in the fire.
One victim, Tracy Ann Cihal, had addressed a letter to Orozco complaining about the motel’s conditions that was found in her belongings after the fire, he said.
Giordani also argued the bolted back door inhibited escape. And, he said, “The victims were not notified before it was too late because the fire alarm was deactivated and never reset.”
Defense attorneys said the alarm was disabled by Alpine employees after someone pulled the alarm weeks before the fire. The company that monitored the alarm system also failed “to adhere to nationally recognized standards of care,” they argued.
The monitoring company denied the alarms were inadequate or that the company caused them to be inadequate in filings in a civil suit. Civil litigation over the fire ended in a confidential settlement.
The tenant who lived in the unit where the fire started had left his stovetop on because Orozco did not provide heat, according to the prosecutor. He went to a convenience store and when he returned, he discovered the fire and ran.
When the resident fled, his door remained open because it had been improperly assembled or installed, Giordani said, allowing the fire to spread quickly.
Orozco did not want to make a statement in court, but answered questions from the judge.
When Bluth asked him: “Why was there no heat in December?” Orozco responded that he would buy heaters for his tenants and have management pass them out, but at the time of the fire, tenants hadn’t received them.
Gentile said the Alpine’s manager had told Orozco he would not distribute heaters until the weather became colder.
‘Weighed on me very heavily’
Bluth said deciding on Orozco’s sentence “weighed on me very heavily.” She said she had planned to give him a harsher sentence before she did more research and saw the defense’s presentation.
“Your sentence is a surprise to me,” Gentile told Bluth at the end of the hearing. “It really is.”
Gentile had asked that his client be put on probation.
District Attorney Steve Wolfson was pleased with the sentence. A landlord has a responsibility to care for properties and give tenants a safe environment, he said, but Orozco demonstrated “severe negligence” and a “lack of caring for his tenants.”
“Six people died,” the district attorney said. “And it was not a pleasant death.”
Review-Journal intern Finnegan Belleau contributed to this story.
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