Convicted Arsonist Dies in Florida Apartment Fire

DANIA BEACH, Fla. -- In a seemingly eerie twist of fate, an apartment fire claimed Bernice Falso's life Sunday.

Unbeknownst to her current neighbors, Falso had intentionally set fire to her home 30 years before, shouting "Burn, burn, burn!" as flames shot through the roof.

Falso's neighbors say the reclusive 77-year-old woman was a heavy smoker and prone to "bizarre" behavior. Despite learning Monday of her arson past, they say they suspect Sunday's fire was accidental.

"I'm in shock to hear that," Falso's next door neighbor Christian Delgado said Monday.

Police would not confirm whether the Bernice Falso who died after Sunday's blaze was the same Bernice Falso who pleaded guilty to arson in 1982. Court, property and voter registration records and identical dates of birth indicate it's the same person.

The cause of the 3 a.m. fire remains under investigation and would likely remain so for several weeks, a spokeswoman from the Broward Sheriff's Office said Tuesday.

Falso had burns over 60 percent of her body when firefighters rescued her from her fifth-floor unit at the Meadowbrook Lakes condo complex, 301 SE Third St. She was pronounced dead after 9 a.m. at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

Delgado said Falso regularly would dump a Publix bag filled with cigarette butts and ashes near the fifth-floor elevator. "We could never figure out why she would do that."

Despite that, Delgado said: "She was a kind lady; she never bothered us in the five years we've lived here."

Nearly 30 years earlier and less than three miles away, Falso etched a much more traumatic memory upon her next-door neighbors in Hollywood's Emerald Hills.

"I remember it vividly. I was terrified," Rita Buschel, 69, said Monday, recalling how she awoke in the predawn hours of July 30, 1982, to the sound of breaking glass and looked out the window to see her neighbor's house with "flames shooting out."

Buschel said she rustled her husband and two young children outside. "And there was the lady sitting across the street on top of a car with a book of matches in her hands, saying 'Burn, burn, burn.' I thought she'd lost her mind."

Falso told police she started the fire at 3610 N. Park Road by piling clothes in the dining room, dousing them with a fifth of Anisette liqueur and igniting them with matches. She was upset because her husband, Vincent, moved out three days earlier and asked for a divorce, according to published news accounts at the time.

Firefighters arrived about 4:30 a.m., an estimated hour after the fire had begun.

Falso told police she knew what she was doing and that "to make sure it would burn" she had remained inside her home until the smoke got so heavy she couldn't breathe, Hollywood Detective Larry Hoisington said at the time.

Vincent Falso was not home at the time. The next day, he rang the Buschel's bell and apologized, Buschel said. Public records show that Vincent Falso, a retired sanitation company owner, died in 1997.

About a week before the fire, Buschel said she called the police on her neighbor: "The lady had been acting rather crazy all week, standing outside screaming at my children like she wasn't a normal person. I was afraid."

Five months after the Hollywood blaze, Falso pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced to five years probation.

The door to Falso's Dania Beach apartment stood open Monday, the acrid smell of smoke heavy in the air. A lotus-sitting Buddha hung on a blackened wall. An array of low-heeled shoes and a teddy bear were in a heap near the door. Gold-framed pictures of saints Joseph and Mary leaned in her soot-streaked kitchen window.

A downstairs neighbor and Falso's frequent church companion at Hollywood's St. Theresa The Little Flower Catholic Church, Mary Loftus, was curt: "She was a good lady. She minded her own business. She worked hard just trying to live."

Falso would have turned 78 on Monday.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service