For days, the residents of Calle València 73 had been warning the authorities that the owner of the bar downstairs was threatening to burn down the building. The woman, who is of Chinese nationality and used Google Translate to communicate, challenged the residents with messages written on the blackboard where the lunch menus were offered. “I will burn down the bar. I know your plan, I will do it before you go in,†he warned.
Iliana, the president of the community, remembers calling the Urban Guard five times, and Ligia, the main neighbor, a few more. Just one day before the events, both went to the Mossos to report the threats. Ligia points out that they were told that, “until the building had burned down”, they could not file a complaint. “When I burn the block I’ll come looking for you so you can help me”, he answered them.
The owner of the bar burned down the building the next day. On April 12 of last year, at 3:40 a.m. Neighbors fled as best they could from the homes after hearing a loud explosion. “It looked like a bomb”, they remember. The fire spread quickly, the spread clothes served as fuel and the cellobert became a chimney. Four neighbors suffered serious burns, a little dog died, the flames reached the top of the building and spread across several blocks of the same block. The neighbors took refuge on the roof, the only space where they were safe and sound, nervously dodging several fireballs.
The first floor collapsed due to the deflagration. Most lost everything. The memories, part of their lives, were buried in the rubble. And they had to leave the property for the six months that the renovations lasted. Half a year at the home of relatives or in rented flats.
Now, a year later, justice has closed the criminal case against the woman in the bar after considering that she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and that she was not aware of what she was doing. “We file the case due to supervening dementia”, the interlocutory notes. The neighbors accept the court decision but regret that it had not been acted upon earlier when they launched their first warnings.
He had thrown glass glasses at passers-by on the street and soaked paper napkins in oil which he then stuck to the bar wall with the intention of setting it on fire. He suffered from a mental illness that no one had diagnosed, but the incidents did not help the authorities to react. “I knew that the lady was not a bad person, but that she had an outbreak, but no one did anything about it,” laments Ligia. No one attended to the lady due to her illness and the Urban Guard, after one of the notices, went there and informed the owner that they would seal off the premises due to lack of sanitation. This process took a few days. And during this time, the owner of the bar burned down the property. “The neighbors think that the procedure has failed and that it could have been avoided. Something in the system has failed, but we cannot accuse anyone”, underlines Iliana.
The floor of Ligia’s apartment was the roof of the bar and it collapsed. Luckily, they had gone to Galicia for the Easter holidays. “When they woke me up in the morning, I already imagined that something had happened with the woman downstairs”, he remembers. The young woman had to get married and she had everything ready. The wedding ring, her future husband’s watch and all her clothes were charred and thrown into a container that was placed in front of the block. The next day, the jewels that were saved and that were in the container disappeared. No one guarded them and someone stole them.
