NEIGHBOR’S BEEF ABLAZE
Alleged Leominster arsonist due back in court
A Leominster woman charged with setting at least one of three recent fires at her neighbor’s house is due back in court this week so a judge can determine whether she’s too dangerous to be released on bail and whether she’s competent to stand trial.
Linda A. Sbrogna, 54, was ordered held without bail on arson and breaking and entering charges yesterday pending Friday’s hearing in Leominster District Court. Sbrogna was arrested Monday night in connection with a fire that scorched her neighbor’s Douglas Avenue home — the third fire there in two weeks.
Paul Legere said he and his fiancee, Rosemary Allen, came home Dec. 7 to find the house full of smoke and a futon “smoldering in the middle of the living room.” Then, shortly after 1 a.m. on Dec. 16, he said the side of their house was damaged when someone ignited the smoke-damaged items they put out as trash.
The state Fire Marshal’s Office determined the fire to be “incendiary in nature,” according to a police report, and investigators found footprints in the snow leading from their house to a garage adjacent to Sbrogna’s property.
“Then we knew for a fact that somebody was targeting us,” Legere said.
On Monday, authorities were called to the house again after fire engulfed the couple’s back porch and in a video provided by a neighbor, a woman later identified as Sbrogna could be seen walking through the same path in the snow.
Police said Sbrogna later admitted to walking up the stairs to her neighbor’s back deck, letting herself in through an unlocked door and using a lighter to set fire to a carpet.
Legere said Sbrogna, who moved into the house behind his several years ago, began dismantling a stone wall that he and his father had built decades ago because “a quarter of an inch — maybe half an inch — of the stones were on her property.”
In 2015, Legere obtained a harassment prevention order barring Sbrogna from damaging the wall and requiring that she stay away from him and his property. The order, he said, didn’t keep Sbrogna from confronting the couple.
“Every time my fiancee or myself go outside, she comes out and yells at us,” he said in an affidavit. “We feel like prisoners in our own home ... We feel scared at times because we don’t know what else she’s going to do.”
One of Sbrogna’s other neighbors, Oscar Myles, said he’s lived through “three years of that woman yelling and screaming.”
During a dispute last summer, Myles said he gave Allen and Sbrogna his boxing gloves.
“I had had enough,” he said yesterday. “I was just hoping it would never come to this.”