Prosecutors in Connecticut announced Friday they will not file charges in connection with a Christmas Day fire in a wealthy suburb that killed three little girls and their grandparents -- a blaze caused by fireplace ashes that had been stashed in a paper bag.
"This is not a decision made easily or lightly," the state attorney for the Stamford-Norwalk judicial district, David I. Cohen, said as he released a report on the blaze, which enveloped a large home under renovation by the girls' mother, Madonna Badger. She escaped along with the contractor, Michael Borcina, who was spending the night, after the blaze erupted about 4:40 a.m.
Badger's three daughters -- Lily, 9, and 7-year-old twins Sarah and Grace -- died, along with Badger's parents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson.
Cohen said that in order to press charges, he would have needed to determine that Badger or Borcina intentionally set the fire or disregarded the idea of any danger from the embers before they went to bed at about 4 a.m. Christmas morning. "It stretches belief to think that they would consciously disregard the danger and go to sleep, much less that they would disregard any danger to the Badger children or Mrs. Badger's parents," Cohen said in his report.
The final report, based on months of investigations by police and fire officials, described a seemingly idyllic Christmas Eve in the large home, with a fire kept burning in the fireplace for most of the day until about 8 p.m., when the decision was made to stop feeding it with wood. After Badger's parents and children went to sleep, she and Borcina went into the garage to wrap gifts until about 3:30 a.m.
When they returned to the house, Borcina filled a paper bag with the fireplace ashes and used his hand to flatten down the bag, to show Badger that the ash had cooled and there were no fiery embers left. But shortly after the two went to sleep, the ashes -- placed inside a plastic container in a mudroom -- ignited a blaze that swept through the 116-year-old, three-story home.
Badger, a Manhattan advertising executive, had bought the home about a year earlier. Both she and her estranged husband, Matthew Badger, have filed lawsuits against the city of Stamford as a result of the blaze.
Matthew Badger's suit alleges that city officials failed to adequately inspect the property during the renovations. Madonna Badger alleges that fire officials erred in tearing down the ruins of the home immediately after the fire, something she says added to her emotional distress and hindered her ability to make insurance claims.
In his report, Cohen also noted the hasty demolition, saying this made it impossible to determine if there were working smoke detectors inside the home.
Cohen's report came out a day after investigators disclosed the cause of another tragic blaze north of New York City, which killed a police captain, his wife, their two teen-age daughters and the family's four dogs on May 1. Police in Carmel, N.Y., said that blaze was caused by cigarette ashes flicked to the ground by the sole survivor, the police captain's 20-year-old son, Thomas Sullivan Jr.
Sullivan had a habit of smoking outside the house and dropping his ashes and butts into a mulch bed, and he told investigators he had been smoking the evening before the fire erupted. Sullivan escaped the flames, but his father, Thomas Sullivan Sr., his mother, Donna Sullivan, and his sisters, Meaghan, 18, and Mairead, 13, were killed.
Copyright 2012 - Los Angeles Times
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
