Victims blamed for their own deaths
The l andlord Andrew Strzelec absolutely insists that had he been caught in the fire that raged through a unit of his rental property and killed three teenagers four years ago, he could have escaped.
He said this again and again Friday — most memorably perhaps when he said, “I will never understand why they didn’t get out. They should have been sitting on the roof of the garage, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the fire department” — in a jaw- dropping day of testimony at the Ontario coroner’s inquest now examining the deaths.
Nineteen-year-old Ben Twiddy, the tenant, and his two visiting friends Marilee Towie and Holly Harrison, then 17 and 18, died on April 29, 2012, when black smoke quickly filled Twiddy’s tiny, lowceilinged second-floor flat.
But from Strzelec’s unyielding performance in the witness stand, it’s no sure thing the 45- year- old could have saved himself.
Certainly, he demonstrated no instinct for self-preservation.
No matter how many times he was thrown a ring buoy by the various lawyers, given the chance to make just a little bit nice, Strzelec seemed incapable of doing anything other than continuing to thrash about in his own harsh words.
Among the galling things he either said live from the stand Friday or on an April 30, 2012, video played for the jurors of an interview with Paul Dow, investigator for the Fire Marshal’s Office, the very day after the fire: ❚ Of Twiddy, who was as a multiple-transplant survivor receiving Ontario Disability Support Program benefits of about $1,000 a month ( and Twiddy had told Strzelec this when he was renting the flat), “It was not a person in a wheelchair who couldn’t get out.” ❚ Of one possible explanation for why the teenagers didn’t escape, “… again, I am speculating, I shouldn’t, but you will find once toxicology test come back there was a reason they did not get out.”
In other words, this with the young people freshly dead, Strzelec was suggesting to the investigator that they were stoned or drunk. Toxicology tests showed nothing of the sort. ❚ Of the fact that even now, Strzelec still hasn’t put a single fire extinguisher in the house or installed a rope ladder as an emergency way out for the second- floor flat, he told Aliza Kroly, lawyer for the families, “People have to take responsibility for their own actions.” ❚ Of another possible reason the kids didn’t escape, “Unless, and again pure speculation, they were dazed and confused before this fire started. We’re talking, you know, Saturday night, a young man, the first time on his own, two young girls — they were not reading the Bible, right?”
Having heard all this and more, late in the day, Claudia Brabazon, lawyer for the fire marshal, put it to Strzelec as plainly as possible and gave him one last opportunity.
What she’d been most struck by in his testimony, she said, “What didn’t come out of your mouth was an expression of condolence for these families.”
“Do you think they would buy my sincerity?” Strzelec snapped, as he threw that buoy, the last of the day, right back at her.
From the relatives’ ranks in the front row came a woman’s voice: “If you tried it.”
But, Brabazon then said, it seemed as if Strzelec was placing all the responsibility for the fire on the victims themselves.
“If you mean, they made mistakes,” he said, “Then yes.
“They started the fire by careless cooking; they transferred the fire to the staircase; they opened windows and they didn’t escape by many means.
“It’s not fair they paid the price for this,” Strzelec added in a lone mollifying touch. “They’re young people.”
In fairness to Strzelec, though inquests aren’t to assign blame but rather come up with recommendations to prevent future similar tragedies, it was pretty obvious from the get-go that he was going to wear the lion’s share of the alleged non-blame.
As he put it once, he knew that at the town of Whitby and the fire department, “they were circling the wagons.”
Yet while the actions of the actual firefighters who went into the house that early morning are beyond reproach, the length of time it took the trucks to get there — the house was less than 0.2 kilometres away from the fire station, on the same street — and run through their procedures has been the subject of much scrutiny.
And most important, it’s become clear that at the Whitby fire department, as at most others across the province, fire prevention — which includes the inspection and prosecution of landlords and others whose premises are unsafe — takes a back seat to the heroics of fighting fires. Whitby in 2012 had 104 firefighters doing “suppression,” and all of six working on fire prevention.
Strzelec’s house first came to the department’s attention in 2008, when it was deemed an illegal three-unit dwelling because it was zoned only for a single family.
The following year, after months of stalling, the department finally charged him and took him to court. In June of 2009, Strzelec and a sister and brother-in-law who were on title, were convicted and fined $5,000 each.
A real issue is whether, as Whitby Fire Chief Dave Speed insisted in his testimony this week, Strzelec told his fire inspector that he’d put fire- resistant drywall behind the thin and highly flammable wood panelling that lined the stairs to Twiddy’s flat.
Strzelec now says he never told the inspector that, but a day ago remembered he put drywall partly up the stairs, though he said just the opposite in his interview on video.
The i nspector, unusually, made no notes of the conversation. It almost doesn’t matter. The jurors know very well now what happens when a canny landlord with a beady eye for the bottom line meets a fire department with a sleepy approach to prevention — fire.
Ben Twiddy paid $ 7 10 a month plus 30 per cent of the hydro bill.