Fire Victims Stunned by Arson Allegations

It just couldn’t be true: Firefighters?

That was the stunned reaction among Malibu fire victims to reports that two area firefighters are suspected of setting last fall’s destructive blaze--one more confusing twist thrust upon residents who have spent the past six months trying to put their lives back together.

“We all want to see these people caught because of the devastation. But, my God, not firemen,” said Mike Caggiano, a onetime City Council member whose rented home on Big Rock Drive was burned.

“I hope they’re innocent,” Caggiano said. “It would devastate the public trust in a profession where trust is so important. . . . It would overshadow the bravery (of other firefighters) at a time when they should be honored.”

The men, Steven R. Shelp, 29, and Nicholas A. Durepo, 24, are suspected by investigators of having set the fire in order to put it out and be treated as heroes. The men have said they were merely driving past when they spotted the fire and stopped to fight it with a garden hose.

For dislocated Malibu residents still getting used to living in cramped converted garages or staying with friends, the news loosed a flood of anger, tempered by a desire to give the suspects the benefit of the doubt.

“People are innocent until proved guilty,” said Madelyn Glickfeld, a state coastal commissioner whose Las Flores Canyon home was burned. “It’s beyond my comprehension that a firefighter could have chosen to put this many people through this much pain. . . . My better side hopes that maybe these are the wrong people.”

Though officials have long attributed the fire to arson, Paul Mantee, an actor and writer who lost his home in Las Flores Canyon, said he had been in “total denial.”

“I didn’t want to think about compounding the disaster with an arsonist,” he said. “I chose to believe that it just sort of started. Until today.”

When he heard the news, “I got sick to my stomach,” Mantee said. “I just took it viscerally.”

Some residents first heard the news from a television reporter during a weekly get-together of victims Wednesday night, as rolling cameras captured their reactions. Some shook their heads in disbelief. A few cried.

“It’s shocking it would be firefighters. But I’m not ready to jump to conclusions yet,” said Arnold York, a Malibu newspaper publisher who lost his hillside home and later founded Operation Recovery, the support group where residents get rebuilding tips and cry on each other’s shoulders.

Activist Susan Shaw, who lives with Mantee, fled the group’s meeting after hearing the news, rather than stay to hear a city building official talk about reconstruction.

“I went outside and cried,” Shaw said. “The whole conversation about rebuilding seemed so ludicrous in light of the information.”

Some residents wondered why authorities have not charged the two men, while others groped for a way to match investigators’ suspicions with televised videotape of the pair helping victims during the opening hours of the four-day blaze, which killed three people and caused more than $375 million in damage.

“It’s hard to reconcile what the Sheriff’s Department is saying and what you see,” York said of the footage. “It’s hard to believe they might have set the fire. . . . It’s irrational.”