Man gets new trial in 1993 triple fatal fire
A man convicted of three counts of second-degree murder stemming from a 1993 fire at two Bloomfield apartment buildings will receive a new trial after prosecutors discovered material that had never been turned over to the defense.
Daniel Carnevale, 56, has maintained his innocence since he was initially questioned.
“We are very excited for Mr. Carnevale,” said his attorney, Elizabeth Anne DeLosa, of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. “He’s been fighting for relief since his conviction in 2007. We’re thankful to the commonwealth for their willingness and openness to work cooperatively with us.”
The Allegheny County District Attorney’s office consented to the new trial based on “after-discovered evidence.” That evidence was a report found this fall in a case file that showed that one Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms chemist disagreed with the findings of another about accelerants found at the scene of the fire.
In the report, the chemist who reviewed the original work — apparently during the same month Carnevale went to trial — called the initial results “meaningless.”
“Although the commonwealth still does not know the circumstances surrounding the creation of this document, including the date it was created, the commonwealth believes
that in the interest of justice, [Post Conviction Relief Act] relief should be granted and petitioner should be awarded a new trial,” prosecutors wrote.
Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning, in an order docketed Tuesday, granted the new trial. No new court dates have been scheduled.
The fire began early Jan. 17, 1993, at the Columbia House and Regal Apartment buildings on Taylor Street in Bloomfield. Three residents, Anita Emery, 31, Florence Lyczko, 63, and Chris Stahlman, 22, died in the blaze.
ATF investigators, who had been asked to help on the case, declared the fire to be incendiary by Jan. 27, citing the nature of burn patterns, alerts by an arson dog and the recovery of a fivegallon can of lacquer thinner.
In the days after the fire, Carnevale was questioned and admitted he had stolen checks from mailboxes of residents of those apartments, but he denied having started the fire.
He was not arrested at that time, and the investigation stalled. It wasn’t until 13 years later, after the case had been assigned to Pittsburgh cold-case detectives and a new witness came forward, that Carnevale was charged.
His trial in August 2007 included testimony from an informant from the Allegheny County Jail. Carnevale’s attorneys said that person lied.
But he was found guilty and is serving life without parole at the State Correctional Institution at Somerset.
In a petition for post-conviction relief, filed in June 2018, Ms. DeLosa argued that the ATF experts failed to follow proper scientific procedures in reaching their conclusions. Instead, she wrote, the fire was likely accidental and caused by the apartment buildings’ heating/boiler system.
Special Agent William Petraitis, who led the 1993 ATF investigation, testified at Carnevale’s trial that “he was able to affirmatively determine that the fire must have been intentionally set as all natural and accidental causes had been eliminated,” Ms. DeLosa wrote.
However, her expert, Douglas Carpenter, found that now-retired Agent Petraitis did not follow accepted science in reaching his conclusion.
He wrote that Agent Petraitis’ use of the process of elimination to determine the fire’s cause has been “deemed wholly unreliable” and now is “expressly forbidden by the fire investigation community.”
Mr. Carpenter concluded that the investigation was “critically flawed” and that the fire should have been classified as accidental.
Prosecutors initially objected to Mr. Carnevale receiving a new trial — writing in their first answer to the court that his argument that the fire was accidental is not new evidence, as required by law for a new trial.
But in October, their conclusion changed upon discovery of the never-before-disclosed report. It consisted of a table with now-deceased ATF scientist William Kinard’s findings from the time of the fire, next to additional findings rendered by Julia Dolan, who is now the ATF Forensic Laboratory chief.
In her conclusions, she wrote that Mr. Kinard’s findings with regard to lacquer thinner on the evidence were “meaningless.”
After prosecutors discovered the report, ATF Special Agent Matthew H. Regentin attempted to determine where it came from and interviewed several people who were involved in the case. No one had any independent recollection of the case or the report, including Deputy District Attorney Jennifer DiGiovanni, who tried Carnevale’s case in 2007.
Mike Manko, a spokesman for the DA’s office, said he had no comment beyond the prosecution’s stance that Carnevale should receive a new trial.
Some of the circumstances in the Carnevale case are reminiscent of another triple-fatal fire — on Valentine’s Day 1995 on Bricelyn Street in East Hills that killed three city firefighters.
Gregory Brown Jr. was also convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors convinced a jury that Mr. Brown set the fire in a conspiracy with his mother to collect on her renter’s insurance policy. Mr. Kinard was also the ATF scientist involved in the Brown investigation.
But Mr. Brown won a new trial in 2014 after his attorneys argued that he was the victim of prosecutorial misconduct at trial. The DA’s office appealed the decision awarding Mr. Brown a new trial and lost.
While that appeal was pending, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Western District of Pennsylvania presented the case to a federal grand jury and obtained an indictment charging Mr. Brown with malicious destruction of property resulting in death.
The case is pending in federal court, and U.S. District Judge David Cercone is expected to hear arguments Wednesday.
Dave Fawcett, who represents Mr. Brown, said there appears to be a trend with the work of the ATF.
“The results ATF used in Brown’s case were wrong and were changed,” he said. “Now we’re finding the ATF did suspect things in other cases. The scary thing is, in Brown and Carnevale, someone knew about these things.”
Mr. Brown’s attorneys, like Carnevale’s, have argued that the fire science that showed the blaze to be arson was flawed, and that the Bricelyn Street fire was also accidental.
In Mr. Brown’s case, the defense has presented evidence that an initial ATF report showed no accelerant was found at the scene, but additional reports submitted later showed gasoline was present.
“We remain hopeful that, as the laundry list of ATF’s missteps and misconduct grows, sooner or later justice will prevail,” Mr. Fawcett said. “This was not an arson. Only bad science and unethical conduct by ATF created a different, false story.”