A former Victoria Building resident testified Wednesday in Jefferson County Court that he encountered Carlos L. Rivera on the building's third floor shortly before fire broke out in a third-floor apartment.
Mr. Rivera, 30, Bronx, who was not a tenant of the 201-205 Academy St. building, is on trial for arson and other crimes stemming from the Dec. 8 blaze that destroyed the 24-unit apartment complex.
Mark Limogues, who lived across the hall from Joseph P. "Jay" Puparro, in whose apartment the fire started, said he briefly met Mr. Rivera on a third-floor landing sometime after 2:10 a.m. the day of the fire. The fire was reported shortly before 3 a.m.
Mr. Limogues testified he had been in bed when some friends stopped at his apartment to ask him to go out for "last call." He denied the request to go to a bar, but after the friends left, he realized one of them had left money on his couch.
He said he ran out of his apartment to catch up to the friends and met Mr. Rivera outside his door. He said he did not know Mr. Rivera, but later was able to remember him from an X-shaped scar on his face.
Mr. Limogues testified that Mr. Rivera, probably jokingly, asked if the money in his hands was for him.
"He looked me square in the face and asked for the money," Mr. Limogues said. "I saw the scar on his face."
Mr. Limogues told Mr. Rivera, "No," the money wasn't for him and then went down the stairs, catching up with his friends on the Gotham Street side of the apartment building. He said he returned the money, went back to his apartment and went back to bed.
A short time later, he heard a police officer kicking at his door, telling him he had to get out of the building because it was on fire. He grabbed his small dog and left, eventually losing all of his belongings, "right down to my kindergarten homework."
He said the man he had met in the hall, who he later learned was nicknamed "Lito," was carrying a duffel bag and "looking back over his shoulder at Jay's apartment." He said he later "put it together" that the man he had encountered was Mr. Rivera, admitting that he harbors "hard feelings" against him owing to his alleged involvement in the fire.
A second witness Wednesday, Lynda L. Coleman, said she, too, saw Mr. Rivera in the building sometime after 12:30 a.m. She said she arrived at a friend's apartment sometime between 12:30 and 1 a.m. and, shortly after, Mr. Rivera knocked on the apartment's door.
She said when he came in, he was "bouncy," "jittery" and "all over the place." She said he set a bag down on the floor and proceeded to talk nonsense for about two or three minutes, then grabbed the bag and left.
"We said, 'What was that all about?; because it didn't make sense to any of us," Miss Coleman said.
Under cross-examination by Mr. Rivera's attorney, Eric T. Swartz, Miss Coleman admitted Mr. Rivera made no mention of setting a fire, although she said she was not able to understand what he was talking about.
In earlier testimony, three witnesses had claimed to have heard Mr. Rivera threaten to set fire to Mr. Puparro's apartment after a series of arguments with him. Some of the alleged threats occurred in the hours before the fire was observed.
Jurors also heard from several local and state fire investigators as to why they believe the fire was not accidental. Capt. Joseph Compo, a certified fire investigator with the Watertown Fire Department, said that the fire had "unusual burn patterns" and that there were areas in Mr. Puparro's apartment where there was "an odor that was distinct and different from the rest from the room."
"We ruled out all accidental causes," he said. "That fire shouldn't have started where it started."
James P. Ryan, an investigator with the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control, said his K-9, Shadow, hit on six spots in Mr. Puparro's apartment where liquid accelerants were believed to be located. He said cuttings from five of the six spots later were shown by state police forensic testing to be positive for an accelerant.
Testimony in the trial will resume this morning.
