NEW YORK — As Deloris Gillespie went up the elevator to her fifth-floor Brooklyn apartment Saturday afternoon, carrying groceries, a man was waiting.
Surveillance video from inside the elevator shows that he looked something like an exterminator, with a canister sprayer, white gloves and a dust mask, which was perched atop his head. The sprayer was full of flammable liquid.
When the elevator opened, the man sprayed the 73-year-old woman, who turned and crouched down to try to protect herself, said New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne. The attacker sprayed her in the face and continued to spray her “sort of methodically” over her head and her body as her bags of groceries draped off her arms, Browne said.
Then, Browne said, the attacker pulled out a barbecue-style lighter and used it to ignite a rag in a bottle. He waited a few seconds as Gillespie huddled on the floor. Then he backed out of the elevator and tossed the flaming bottle in.
Neighbors in the Prospect Heights building reported a fire but had no idea that a woman was being burned alive.
Overnight, a 47-year-old man smelling of gasoline went into a police station and implicated himself in Gillespie’s death, Browne said. The suspect, Jerome Isaac, told police he set her on fire because she owed him $2,000 for some work he had done for her, Browne said.
Jaime Holguin, who lives on the same floor as Gillespie, saw surveillance pictures of the attacker and said, “Oh, my God!” Holguin, the manager of news development for The Associated Press, said the man in the surveillance pictures looked like a man who had lived with Gillespie for about six months last year and appeared to have been helping her out.
Gillespie’s arrangement with Isaac appeared to have ended by early 2011. Months later, Holguin started seeing the man nearby on the street, looking “a lot more disheveled” and pushing a cart full of aluminum cans.
Browne said that after setting Gillespie ablaze, Isaac set another fire at his apartment building nearby, then hid on a roof before turning himself in to police.
Isaac was arrested Sunday on murder and arson charges.
Rickey Causey, who said he was Gillespie’s nephew, said his aunt had hired the man to clear out her cluttered apartment and the man had harassed Gillespie after she fired him over the suspicion that he had stolen her belongings.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
