WESTFIELD – A city man has been arraigned for setting fire to the Country Mart on Little River Road last week.
Louis J. Carmel, 50, of 541 Little River Road, was arraigned Friday in Westfield District Court on a charge of burning a building after a joint investigation by city and state investigators into an early morning fire at the Country Mart at 397 Little River Road which caused an estimated $75,000 worth of damage to the building.
City firefighters and police responded to the fire July 5 which was reported by a pedestrian at 2:32 a.m. to firefighters in the Little River Fire Sub Station which is almost directly across the street from the convenience store.
The arriving police and firefighters reported that there was a fire behind the building which had spread into the store’s attic.
After the firefighters extinguished the fire, fire investigators from the city’s fire and police departments worked with state troopers assigned to the Fire Marshal’s and Hampden County District Attorney’s offices and identified Carmel as a suspect.
Westfield Police Det. Brian Freeman reports in a court document how Carmel allegedly burned the store.
His report starts with Carmel’s purchase of a red cigarette lighter at an East Main Street convenience store before driving his pickup truck, with a gray five gallon bucket in the bed, to the driveway of a vacant house at 327 Little River Road.
There, Freeman reports, Carmel changed his shoes and “took the bucket with an unknown quantity of gasoline from another container in the truck and walked towards the Country Mart.”
When Carmel reached the store, which was about 200 yards away, Freeman reports he poured the gasoline onto a pallet behind the store and lit the gas.
Carmel then fled, his shoes falling off as he ran back to his pickup, and dropped the bucket on his way.
The four investigating agencies issued a joint press release Friday through the Fire Marshal’s office which reported that Carmel, who lives about 200 yards away from the store in the opposite direction from his parking spot, is a regular customer at the Country Mart and “was upset by conversation inside the store earlier in the day.”
At Carmel’s arraignment, Judge William O’Grady ordered that he be held without right to bail pending a dangerousness hearing on Monday.
