Court shown videotape of accused’s fire confession

A jury on Tuesday was shown a videotape in which a man accused of murdering his mother calmly confesses several years earlier to setting her house on fire.

In the December 2008 taped police interview, Darwin Lescano is asked by police to describe to them the arson attack as though it’s a movie. “It’s not like a movie, it’s just like a job,” Lescano says.

Asked why he set fire to the home on Cambie Road in Richmond, he replies: “I don’t know, uh ... I have a thing against my mom ... I guess you have to, eh, if you’re gonna do something like that, right?”

Lescano, who has pleaded not guilty to the May 2015 second-degree murder of 66-year-old Redelma Belissario, tells the two officers that his mother had been bothering him about “little things” but adds that he was doing crystal meth at the time.

He tells the RCMP officers that he had earlier warned his mother that he was going to set the home ablaze.

Lescano, now 41, says he had purchased gasoline from a gas station and on the day of the arson attack waited until his mom had left to go to work.

He says he made sure he was the only one left in the home because he didn’t want to “go down for murder. I didn’t want anyone hurt anyway, so ... not physically at least.”

He describes how he went through the rooms and poured gasoline and then used a lighter to set a sock on fire before throwing the sock down on the gasoline.

“Everything just caught on fire and I just ran out. It was pretty crazy actually.”

He says that after he set the home ablaze, he went to his car to drive away and felt bad at first but that it didn’t matter.

Lescano says he called his mother to tell her what had happened because he wanted to get a reaction from her and then called 911 to report the arson attack.

Laughing and joking at times during the interview, Lescano at one point tells the officer that his confession is “gonna be good on camera.”

After one of the officers tells him that it took a “big man” to step up and take responsibility for the attack, he replies: “If I didn’t do that, I would be like caught anyways, right?”

After the hour-long video was played for the B.C. Supreme Court jury, Crown counsel Kristin Bryson said that the prosecution’s case was completed.

Court has heard that Lescano pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced to jail time. After he was released from prison, his mom took him back to live with her again, this time at the victim’s home in the 11000-block Woodhead Road in Richmond.

The Crown’s theory is that in the last two months of her life, the mom had reported a lot of problems with her son and that the two had fought frequently, with Lescano stealing things from her and threatening her.

Lescano is alleged to have used an axe to kill his mother, with the victim’s body being discovered in her home by her other son several days after another family member reported to police that the mom was missing. The accused was arrested in Vancouver on June 2, 2015, nearly three weeks after the slaying.

The jury has been asked to return to the Vancouver courtroom Wednesday afternoon.