WINDHAM – Three months ago, as the apartment building next to Corsetti’s Market in Windham burned, the building’s tenants – all in their 20s – stood in shock watching as their home was destroyed by fire, water and smoke.

Courtney DeWitt held her 2-year-old, Dominick, and cried as she talked on her cell phone that sunny Friday afternoon, Dec. 7. Andre Lacey, after rushing home from work, watched fire crews work quickly to limit the damage and tried to console his fiance?, Angela Owens, who walked around visibly disturbed. She was suspicious that the fire, which ignited in the middle apartment of the three-unit building, was “fishy,” as she said at the time.

It turns out, Owens was correct about the fire. State fire investigators quickly determined the fire was intentionally set, and on Thursday the building’s owner, Donato Corsetti, was indicted by a Cumberland County grand jury on two counts of arson.

Three months later, DeWitt, her boyfriend and her son remain homeless and on the move, staying nights with friends and family. Lacey and Owens lucked out, in a way, and are renting a house. But the two couples that lost so much that day are still struggling, financially and emotionally, to get back to where they were before the fire.

DeWitt, who moved to the 447 Gray Road apartment building in the summer of 2012, was living with her boyfriend, Nick Coffin, and her baby in the apartment, which featured two bedrooms and a den that they converted to a third bedroom.

In August, Lacey rented a spare bedroom from DeWitt, her coworker at PT’s Showclub in Portland. In October, Lacey invited his fiance?, Angela Owens, to move to Windham from Texas.

While Lacey was at work at the time of the fire, DeWitt, Owens and the baby were home, and initially oblivious to what was happening outside.

“Nobody came to warn us, and we didn’t have any smoke detectors,” DeWitt said last week. “We had the window curtains open downstairs, and Angela went downstairs after I got out of the shower to get the baby’s diaper, and she saw smoke in the bay window, and opened the porch door and our porch was actually almost already on fire. And there was already a fire truck out there, and nobody had even told us. So she ran back up and told us to get out of the house, and so we got what we could and ran outside.”

Since that day, DeWitt said she, the baby and Coffin have been unable to cobble together enough money for an apartment and are struggling to make ends meet.

“We’re actually still homeless. We’re hopping around still. We haven’t been able to find a place,” DeWitt said. “It’s kind of been a mix between family’s houses like my mom’s, my grandparent’s. We’ve just been staying on the couch, the three of us – me, my boyfriend and the baby. It’s been pretty inconvenient to say the least.”

DeWitt, 22 and originally from Westbrook, was finally starting to feel settled in her apartment in Windham, but that feeling of self-sufficiency was erased in the fire.

“It’s not really that great seeing we had a nice place to live and we had never been late for anything and we had all the bills taken care of,” she said. “We loved living there, and to have it all taken away.”

They have to pay for a storage unit on Route 302 in Westbrook, but what is stored there was damaged in the fire. Worse, they have to eat out quite a bit “because we don’t have a place to put groceries, so it’s costing us a lot more,” she said.

DeWitt said they aren’t able to stay in one place very long either.

“In an average week, we’ll go from staying in Westbrook to South Portland up to Windham, and then over to Gray, New Gloucester and then back down to South Portland,” she said. “So it’s a bunch of jumping around.”

All that moving means they use a lot of gas. And since they only have one car between them and DeWitt needs to take care of Dominik, she isn’t able to work as often as she’d like.

The lack of savings means they can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit necessary to obtain a new apartment. All the while, they’re living day to day with basically what they salvaged from the fire, since most of their stuff was either ruined or smoke damaged and now in storage.

“It’s definitely super-depressing to not be able to have any of your own things and always feel like you’re an inconvenience to everybody because you’re constantly relying on other people to be able to do anything,” DeWitt said.

Emotionally, DeWitt said she tries not to think about the fire and what they’ve lost.

“There have definitely been a couple times when I’ve had a complete breakdown over it, but I just try not to think about it and hope something will happen, but everything just keeps getting worse,” she said.

‘Playing catch-up’

Things are a little better for Lacey and Owens, who managed to secure an apartment in Westbrook from a woman who allowed them to rent without the initial security deposit.

“It wasn’t an easy three months,” Lacey said earlier this week. “We went through a whole bunch of stuff where we were homeless for like a week after (the fire) living out of the Super 8 in Westbrook, until a lady allowed us to get into a house she was renting. Without her we would have been in a whole lot of trouble.”

There’s a reason Lacey and Owens are renting a house rather than another apartment.

“We probably won’t live in another multi-unit apartment because if one unit goes up [in flames] everything else is at risk,” Lacey said. “We’re very, very conscious about what’s on in the house, what’s plugged in, not to the point of paranoia, but just a heightened awareness of it now.”

Lacey said the couple is struggling financially, as well, and “would be a whole lot worse” without the help of their landlord cutting them a break.

“I can say we certainly didn’t like the lack of stability,” he said. “We’re still playing catch-up financially. We’re still trying to get caught up from all that BS.”

Lacey said he’s been able to continue working in the aftermath of the fire and was thankful his fiance? detected the smoke and got out alive. But he was frustrated no first-responder came to alert them.

“It seemed really weird for rescue that no one came to notify us,” Lacey said, adding that he had called the fire chief about the situation. “If Angel didn’t walk outside, there’s no telling how long they would have been in there.”

When asked about Lacey’s concerns, Windham Fire Chief Charlie Hammond, who oversaw the firefight, confirmed he had talked with Lacey.

“There’s a dispute over that, because I was told that somebody knocked on the door,” Hammond said. “I was told by one of our crew that they went to the door, knocked on the door, and they waited a few seconds and then we were busy. We went to work.

“Our routine is we’ll do a search on the building,” he continued. “And at the same time we’re doing a search on the fire building, we’re also going to the other units and knocking on doors and making sure, or we have information from residents of the building that everybody is accounted for.”

Lacey is also frustrated with the landlord, Corsetti, since there were no smoke detectors inside the building that could have alerted his fiance? and others to the fire.

“There was no fire alarm in the apartment, but when we went to move out a week later, conveniently there was a fire alarm there,” Lacey said.

Lacey and DeWitt also said Corsetti didn’t return their security deposit, but did say they each received December’s rent from Corsetti, which they retrieved from Corsetti’s Store with no interaction with Corsetti.

In a search warrant application filed at Cumberland County Superior Court, lead investigator Chris Stanford wrote that Corsetti told investigators that the fire was the result of a mob hit and plot to kill Corsetti for not paying on gambling debts. Stanford, however, wrote in court documents that the fire was a botched scheme to recoup insurance money in an effort to save the property from foreclosure.

Corsetti, who didn’t return phone calls seeking comment, has also lost his primary residence in the aftermath of the fire. According to Richard Sirois, of Regency Realty Group in South Portland, Sirois served a foreclosure notice to Corsetti three days before the fire.

“On Dec. 4 it was assigned to us. So I went to the store between 2-3 p.m., met with Mr. Corsetti and advised him that the place had been foreclosed on Nov. 29 and that he had certain options available to him, which I can’t get into, but he declined those options at that time,” Sirois said.

Sirois said Corsetti had owned the apartment building as well as the single-family residence to the rear of the 2.8-acre property in Windham Center. Both buildings were under a single mortgage with lender Green Tree Servicing.

Sirois said the property, whose driveway has gone unplowed, is in the stage of appraisal by Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and that Regency would be the listing agency once a valuation is determined. He said Terry Bragdon will be the listing agent and the property will be sold as-is.

“It’s an unusual piece of property because it has a three-unit that’s been burned out and it has a very beautiful single-family house where Donato used to live,” he said.

Sirois said Corsetti called in early February to notify Sirois he had vacated the property, “so we went in at that point in time and changed the locks, and now it’s in the process of having a valuation put on it,” Sirois said.

Rough going

While Windham hasn’t seen an arson for a long time, fires that displace families are far too common both in Windham as well as all over the state, said Eric Hynes, response manager for the American Red Cross of Maine in Portland, which averages 325 disaster responses a year, most of them house fires.

Hynes was at the scene of the Windham arson on Dec. 7 and remembers the three occupants in distress.

“This was a sudden event,” Hynes said. “It was a sunny Friday afternoon. All was well otherwise. So it was a very normal day for them and then disaster strikes. It was very terrifying. They were upset, they were distraught, they were not thinking clearly. And that’s why we’re there to help them put one foot in front of the other.”

The Red Cross worked at the scene to salvage belongings and then gave the two couples some money for essentials and even paid for a hotel for several nights.

Hynes remembers watching as they retrieved items inside the apartment that may have escaped fire damage since the fire never spread to their unit, but that will likely never be useable since they were destroyed by smoke and water.

“I think they were trying to hold onto some things that in my eyes were probably not worth holding onto only because I could see it was destroyed or you could smell the smoke,” Hynes said. “But to someone who owns that jacket or owns that pair of pants, it’s theirs and they don’t want that to be taken away from them, and that’s a perfectly understandable feeling.”

Referring to the two couples’ experience since the fire, especially DeWitt and Coffin’s attempt to right their financial ship, Hynes said the process won’t be easy.

“Our lifestyles are subject to change at a moment’s notice, and when a fire strikes, for many people, it can be the end of another beginning where they’ve finally reached a point in their life where they have a few furniture items, they feel settled, they’ve got a roof over their heads, and a fire happens,” Hynes said. “And that right there can be years to overcome. It can take two or three years to regain what they had.”

A Dec. 7 fire at 447 Gray Road in Windham, later ruled an arson, left its tenants homeless. Three months later, they are still struggling emotionally and financially. 
Courtesy photo by Andrew Constantine

447 Gray Road in Windham this week