A fire that may been caused by arson destroyed Box Pack Mail early Tuesday morning in Española.
The business located at the intersection of Fairview Lane and Railroad Avenue was heavily damaged by a fire that broke out in the northwest corner of the building, Española Fire Chief John Kitchen said.
Store owners Carole and Art Pruett, who live in Medanales, continued to inspect the wreckage hours after the fire.
“It’s probably going to be a total loss,” Carole Pruett said.
Española Police Sgt. Christian Lopez said an arrest should be coming soon in connection with that fire and a fire started at Rancho de Chimayó and a barn fire that happened Aug. 15 in Brazos. He identified the suspect as a male but said he could not reveal any further details.
Kitchen said the flames from Tuesday’s fire were mostly contained to the corner of the store that housed the business services department, but heat and smoke caused damage throughout the rest of the store. A medical supply office located in the same building as Box Pack Mail did not suffer serious damage, Kitchen said.
He said if that office would have caught fire with its oxygen supply tanks then, “That would have been a tremendous fire.”
The Pruetts said a state Fire Marshall investigator told them that the fire was probably the work of arsonists.
“He smelled gasoline,” Carole Pruett said. “That’s why he thinks it’s arson.”
State Fire Marshal investigator Dan Wright was at the scene, but he would only say that the investigation is ongoing.
Española Police officer Jeff B. Martinez said he would be handling the criminal investigation after Wright gave him his report.
“It looks like it might be (arson),” Martinez said.
This determination left Pruett feeling ill.
“It makes me sick,” Carole Pruett said. “It makes me feel like people out there don’t understand how hard a small business person works.”
No was injured in the blaze, Kitchen said. He said firefighters were called to the scene at about 1 a.m. and had put out the fire by 3 a.m. Fire departments from Santa Clara Pueblo, La Mesilla and Agua Sana assisted with the fire.
Kitchen speculated that sheet rock prevented the fire from coming through the roof of the building.
“We got pretty quick knock down (on the fire),” he said.
The couple said the fire destroyed computers, a brand new copier, a credit card machine and other electronic equipment. The Pruetts were unsure what the estimate on the damage was or when they would reopen.
“I wouldn’t even attempt it right now,” Carole Pruett said.
She said they had small problems in the past like a break-in a few years ago.
“(But) that was a piece of cake,” she said. “This is the whole store.”
Box Pack Mail is part gift shop, business services store and expresso café. They also sell cards and have an online business. The couple was named the Entrepreneurs of the Year earlier this year at the 10th annual New Mexico Small Business Development Center awards banquet,
They are originally from San Antonio, Texas, and first opened up shop in Española in 1990. They moved to their current location, a Richard Cook-owned minimall, in 1998, they said.
This was their only business and they seemed more confused than anything else about what to do next in order to reopen the business.
“I don’t know what to do with myself,” Carole Pruett said.
“What do we do?” she asked her husband.
Art Pruett said he didn’t know why someone would attack the store.
“No disgruntled employees. Nothing like that,” he said.
Cook did not return calls for comment.
The Box Pack Mail fire was one of three fires that are under investigation for arson in the past week: one in Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and one in Arroyo Seco, according to Española Fire Department. Lopez was not sure if the aforementioned suspect is under investigation for these fires.
Two fires burning in the same Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo adobe raised Española firefighters’ suspicions Aug. 15, Kitchen said. A chair and mattress caught fire around 8:30 p.m. in one room of the house, and a bed in another room was also ablaze, Kitchen said.
The fires took about three minutes to put out, Kitchen estimated, with the home sustaining mostly smoke damage. No obvious accelerants were found at the scene, Kitchen said, but the incident was forwarded to the state Fire Marshalls office for investigation.
Homeowner Alvaro Aragonez, who occupies a mobile home behind the Jackrabbit Trail adobe, said the investigators told him the fire appeared to be an arson, though Aragonez said he couldn’t discuss details, as the home’s ownership is under litigation.
“There is some type of dispute going on with out of state relatives,” Kitchen said.
Aragonez’s uncle, Juan Lopez, who was occupying the building, said he lost all of his belongings to smoke damage.
“That house was built during the depression, before I was even around,” Lopez, who left the house shortly before it caught fire, said of his former home.
No one had to be evicted from another building hit by a suspected arson Monday morning around 4:30 a.m. — it was a display model doublewide trailer at Solitaire Homes in Arroyo Seco. Flames were shooting out of the roof of the 2,300 square foot model, worth about $100,000, when manager Mike Champouillon arrived on the scene around 5 a.m., he said.
“I was afraid (the fire) was going to catch the house behind it,” officer manager Heidi Mathiasen, the first employee on scene, said. “The firefighters did an awesome job.”
Santa Fe County Fire Department Assistant Chief John Wheeler said one of the other homes was within 20 feet of the blaze, which totalled the trailer. Although Kitchen, whose department provided a ladder truck to target hot spots on the mobile home’s roof, said the fact that the unit was not hooked up to utilities raised suspicions of arson, Wheeler said his Department couldn’t make that determination.
The state Fire Marshal’s office has not yet issued an opinion on the cause of the July 11 fire at Rancho de Chimayó Restaurant or the March 2 fire at the Adult Probation and Parole Office on Paseo de Oñate in Española.
“Very rarely is there a note saying, ‘Please look in that corner for a gas can I threw when I lit the building on fire,” Wheeler said of the challenge posed by arson investigations.