BELIZE CITY, Mon. Dec. 24, 2018– Early Friday morning, December 21, a fire erupted in the second story of a wooden house at #6701 Cleghorn Street. A male tenant living in the home is believed to have intentionally set the fire, and police said they were told that the man was suffering from mental instability.

Station Officer of the National Fire Service, Orin Smith, said that the fire occurred around 9:27 a.m. He said that when the fire department arrived they saw thick smoke coming from the upper flat of the house.  Firefighters were able to extinguish the fire, but nothing in the upper flat could have been saved.

According to Maria Cocom, 56, the owner of the house, the entire upper flat was destroyed by the fire and the lower flat sustained water damages. She told us that she and her common-law husband, who passed away about 3 years ago, worked for years to build the house.

Cocom said the structure was a family home, and all that her family has now are the clothes on their backs. She lived upstairs with some of her grandkids, while her son and his wife lived downstairs with their kids. Cocom’s 11-year-old grandson was playing in the living room when the fire was set. Thankfully, everyone survived.

The fire originated on the southwest of the house, in a bedroom, according to Smith. It was labeled as an incendiary fire, meaning that someone intentionally started it. Smith was not able to say where in the room the fire started, however.

Smith said that information being passed around while the firefighters were putting out the fire was that, at the time of the fire, after almost all the occupants in the structure had evacuated the house, there was still one person inside the upper flat, in the room where the fire originated.

Another person living in the house, AJ Bajaj, said that he went upstairs to help the person out of the room and to attempt to extinguish the fire, but the person refused to open the door. After Bajaj gained access to the room, the tenant ran out and left the building, even after Bajaj asked him for help. The family said they heard that he is in police custody at this time.

At the time of the fire, there were rumors that the tenant was trying to take his own life by setting the fire in his room. Since then, however, police have provided a clarification. They say that after speaking to the owner of the house, they learned that the tenant was actually suffering from a mental disorder. He had believed that somebody was coming to attack him and so he locked himself in the room and set some clothing on fire.

The tenant was detained but later released from police custody, and thus his name has not been made public by police. The police are still investigating the matter, but the house owner reportedly does not want to pursue the matter in court.

Cocom said that she and her family don’t have anywhere else to go, and she is not sure what the next move will be. She hopes to someday rebuild the home that she and her husband worked hard to build. She also said that, after her husband died, she had stopped paying the insurance, and when she started renting the rooms she had the funds to insure the house again, but never got around to doing it.

Eleven persons in total were living in the house. The value of the damages is estimated to be $15,000.