Mar 21, 2009 11:29 pm US/Eastern
Ex-Volunteer Firefighter Charged In Fatal NY Fire
Nassau County Police Charge 19-Year-Old Caleb Lacey With Arson, 4 Counts Of 2nd Degree Murder
CBS 2's Kathryn Brown contributed to this report.
MINEOLA (CBS) ―
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Firefighters battled a 2-alarm fire that ripped through a two-story building in Lawrence on Feb. 19. The blaze claimed the lives 4 people, including a mother and her 3 children.
CBS
Police say a volunteer firefighter started a blaze that killed a mother and her three children on Long Island, and all in the hopes of looking like a hero.
Now, he's facing murder charges.
Too overcome to say much, Edit Vanegas walked out of the Nassau County courthouse moments after coming face-to-face with the man police say killed his family.
"It hurts so bad," Vanegas says. "I feel bad. I don't have a word for this."
Investigators arrested Vanegas' neighbor, 19-year-old Caleb Lacey, Friday. 24 hours, prosecutors charged him with igniting the blaze on Lawrence Avenue last month.
Police say he poured gasoline into the building's staircase, then started the fire.
The inferno trapped Vanegas' family – 46-year-old wife Morena, and their daughters, nine-year-old Susanna and 13-year-old Andrea, and their 19-year-old son Saul Presa – upstairs.
Vanegas jumped out a window – he tried, but couldn't save his entire family in time. Two of his sons also escaped the flames.
"I want him to stay in jail forever," America Chavez, Morena's sister, says. "He took my sister, my little girls, my nephew forever, and we're never going to see them again."
In court, prosecutors said Lacey deliberately set the fire, then later responded to the call as a volunteer firefighter.
Investigators say the 19-year-old has a "hero complex," and believe he started the blaze to work his way up the ranks at the Lawrence-Cedarhurst Fire Department.
"He responded to the fire, and it's within 100 feet of his house," Det. Lt. John Azzata, of the Nassau County Homicide Squad, says. "So his neighbors would see him, his family would see him, fighting this fire."
That was hardly comforting to the Vanegas family.
"My daughter, my three grandchildren [are dead]," Morena's mother, Yolanda Turcios, says. "It's very hard for me."
Stricken family members are praying that justice will come, and come swiftly.
Lacey is charged with one count of arson, and four counts of second-degree murder.
In a statement, the fire department he volunteers with says that, when the teen joined up, a routine background check came up clean.
The department also expressed sympathy to the victims and noted that "many of our volunteers risked their lives in an effort to save those who lost their lives."
Hempstead Town officials had issued summonses to the building's owners for removing a fire escape without a permit, and nine other town code violations.
On the day of the fire, a friend of the family who lives a few blocks away called Morena Vanegas "a wonderful mother."
"They were a very, very nice family," said a weeping Marta Reyes, who had befriended Vanegas in their native El Salvador.
"She was always with her kids," Reyes added.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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