Colorado Springs – A 36-year-old Colorado Springs man faces first-degree murder charges for allegedly setting a fire that killed two people early Tuesday morning at the Castle West apartments.
Gene Johnson, who was not a resident of the apartment building, asked for an attorney Wednesday during his advisement in El Paso County Court.
Fire officials did not release the identities of the victims, whose bodies were discovered Wednesday. The bodies were still in the 135-unit building – portions of which were still burning – late Wednesday.
Colorado Springs police Lt. Rafael Cintron said police were looking for other suspects in the fire, which injured about two dozen people, including a firefighter, and destroyed the building. Authorities also were seeking a gold, early-1990s model four-door Acura that was seen near the apartments Tuesday morning.
Johnson was arrested early Wednesday and is being held without bail in the El Paso County Jail.
He was arrested in July 2005 in El Paso County for possession of a controlled substance and again in December of that year on suspicion of domestic violence involving assault and harassment. He pleaded guilty to the drug charge later that year and was sentenced to three years of probation. His criminal record also includes unresolved misdemeanor theft and petty trespassing charges filed in November.
Colorado Springs Fire Marshal Brett Lacey said firefighters have conducted cursory searches of 70 percent of the three-story building. Firefighters will have to shore up the remainder of the building before it can be safely searched.
“Quite frankly, with the damage that we’ve seen here, and what’s occurred, I found it very fortunate that so far we’ve only found two (bodies),” Lacey said. “I’m not going to be a bit surprised if the number of victims increases. Hopefully it won’t, but we’ve still got a significant part of the building to search.”
Once a search for victims is completed, arson investigators will begin to process evidence, trying to identify burn patterns and determine whether an accelerant was used.
The Red Cross said Wednesday that 15 to 20 people are still not accounted for. A list of tenants kept in the manager’s office burned in the fire.
“That’s been a difficult task for us to try to chase,” Lacey said. “…The fact is, we really have no good number as to who may have been there.”
Teresa Vieira, a mass care coordinator for the Red Cross, said each of the estimated 300 displaced residents had found a place to stay Wednesday, either with family, with friends or in different apartments.
“They just gave us keys. They didn’t ask any questions, just what our old apartment number was,” said James Evans, who leaped from a third-story window Tuesday to escape the fire.
Two dogs were found alive Wednesday.
Police and fire investigators; agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents said the investigation will last for weeks.
“This was a community tragedy. It’s a very human tragedy. We are involved because this is an extremely violent crime,” said Matt Horace, a special agent in the ATF’s Denver office.
An ATF team of arson/explosive experts is expected to arrive today.
Lacey said that accelerant-sniffing dogs from the CBI have not yet entered the building. Firefighters conducting a preliminary search of the building have gone in behind “heavy rescue” firefighters after engineers deemed it safe to do so.
“What we have left are portions of the building that are very severely damaged. And it’s probably going to require us to do some shoring and some minor construction to make that safe for us to go in there,” Lacey said.
Lacey said one of the bodies was found shortly after noon Wednesday and the other just before 4 p.m. He did not know where in the building the bodies were located.
Because the fire continued to burn, water was still being sprayed from aerial ladder trucks Wednesday.
“What that does, it freezes at night because of the temperatures. … It’s added more weight to the building that wasn’t designed for it,” he said.
Tenant Celia Diaz called news that the fire was intentionally set “awful.”
“That those people had to die because somebody was (angry), I don’t think it was right. There were a lot of people there, a lot of families. They destroyed a lot of families,” Diaz said.
Jasmine Davis, 19, said she saw a woman running around outside the building after the fire started. The woman was screaming, “He said he was going to beat my mom up in front of me and set me on fire and look, he tried to kill me,” Davis said.
She said police quickly whisked the woman away.
When she learned the fire was arson, Davis said: “Put it to you like this: If I see him, he won’t make it to prison.”
Davis was reunited with her dog, Zeus, on Wednesday after the animal was found Tuesday by CBI agent Jerry Means and a group of firefighters.
“That’s the good part about something like this, to be able to help somebody out who lost everything,” Means said.
