Ex-tenant says she felt safe at warehouse
Former Ghost Ship resident Carmen Brito saw fire trucks constantly circling the block, police officers frequently visiting the warehouse and child protective services agents regularly touring the inside of the warehouse during the year she lived in the Fruitvale artists collective.
Fire Station 13 was a block away, she testified Thursday afternoon. “I felt safe.”
“I don’t think I’ve lived somewhere with so much of a presence of government officials,” she said.
Brito, who shared her experience publicly in the days and weeks following the Dec. 2, 2016, fire, testified Thursday in an emotional day of testimony at the Alameda County Superior courtroom.
Master tenant Derick Almena, 49,
who leased the warehouse and brought in up to 25 tenants at a time, and Max Harris, 29, whom prosecutors have described as the secondin-command who collected rent payments, both face 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter for each person who died in the blaze. Almena and Harris are accused of creating a death trap and then inviting guests to an ill-advised party inside.
Brito, now an English teacher, described responding to a Craigslist ad to move into the warehouse at the beginning of 2016 and entering the eclectic warehouse for the first time.
“It was like stepping into a new world. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen,” she said. “It seemed to hold almost everything possible.”
She initially paid $400 monthly rent and recalled no sprinklers or exit signs in the premises, and one smoke alarm in one tenant’s space.
She described a community where there were regular events, sometimes a small informal drum circle with around eight people, and usually a monthly larger event with more than 50 people.
On the day of the fire, Brito said, she took a nap and woke up gagging on smoke. She yelled for help, sat up in her lofted bed, looked over her shoulder and through a tapestry she hung nearby she could see an orange glow from the kitchen area in the rear of the warehouse. It was the early stages of the fire.
“It was like I was underwater, but I could hear the music and very far away my own voice,” she testified.
She put on her shoes and coat, thinking it was cold outside. She had no concept that the fire would become massive in those early moments, she said.
She quickly realized it was too big a fire to fight and she fled from the warehouse, as Harris and Bob Mule ran toward the “monstrous glow,” she said.
At one point, Harris yelled “Fire!” and it “felt like a shock wave … like something hit all of us,” she recalled. The residents all ran outside, where she sucked in a big gulp of fresh, cold air.
Brito said she phoned 911 from the front doorway as she saw Harris use his cell phone light to usher more than a dozen residents outside as he screamed, “This is the exit! Come this way!”
Prosecutors played a portion of her 911 call, along with others, as Brito dabbed her eyes with a tissue. The recordings elicited hugs and sobs among victims’ family members in the gallery.
“There’s people inside! There’s people inside! We need a lot of help!” one caller screamed to a dispatcher. Another just kept repeating over and over “Oh my God” as frantic screams could be heard in the background.
Brito told of an unknown blond woman with heavy eyeliner outside asking if she was calling 911. Next thing she knew, the woman was gone and back into the warehouse, an emotional Brito stated.
An earlier witness testified about escaping the night of the fire and bumping into a young, blond woman with wide eyes who looked scared and walked around in a circle on the first floor. It’s unclear if this is the same person Brito saw.
During an afternoon break in Brito’s testimony, emotions ran deep in the hallway. The mother of fire victim Chelsea Dolan embraced Brito as the pair sobbed. Colleen Dolan broke down in tears, sitting on the floor as fellow victims’ family members, attorneys and friends consoled her.
Earlier in the day, the Oakland Fire Department’s lead investigator into the blaze told jurors she could not exclude an incendiary device as the cause of the catastrophe, but found no evidence of it.
“We didn’t find any evidence of Molotov cocktails,” retired inspector Maria Sabatini testified. “But we couldn’t eliminate it due to the amount of damage.”
Defense attorneys asked Sabatini questions intended to push their theory that a group of unidentified men sparked the fire by smashing containers full of gasoline in the back of the building.
The unsanctioned home and work space for artists was strewn with extension cords, cables and flammable wood, and Sabatini has testified in the past that the fire was “most likely” caused by an electrical failure.
On Thursday, Sabatini told prosecutors that no distorted glass, which might be consistent with a Molotov cocktail, was found in the area where the fire ignited. She said a witness description of seeing smoke followed by a glow in the early stages of the fire was not consistent with such a firebomb.