Murderpedia has thousands of hours of work behind it. To keep creating
new content, we kindly appreciate any donation you can give to help
the Murderpedia project stay alive. We have many
plans and enthusiasm
to keep expanding and making Murderpedia a better site, but we really
need your help for this. Thank you very much in advance.
Judge: Autistic’s mom to serve 10 years for
'torture of her vulnerable child'
Judge to Marsh: ‘Torture,’ ‘his blood is on your
hands’
By Sheryl Kornman - TucsonCitizen.com
September 19, 2008
Diane Lynn Marsh was sentenced Thursday to 10 years
in prison for the March 2007 killing of her autistic son, Brandon
Williams, 5.
Marsh sobbed through much of the sentencing by
Judge Hector Campoy in Pima County Superior Court.
Campoy said Marsh must pay for the repeated
“torture of her vulnerable child,” who looked to her for nurture and
instead “must have been bewildered” by her actions.
The judge said he tried to imagine what the boy
must have been thinking when he saw “the object of his love tie him
down, allow him to be brutalized and to inflict a skull fracture.”
“You may be a good person to (fellow church
members), but you were a horrible person to Brandon. You are
responsible for his homicide.
“His blood is on your hands,” Campoy said.
Defense attorney Steve Sonenberg asked for
compassion and for probation for Marsh on all charges, saying she is
the one who suffers the most from Brandon’s death. A jury convicted
her Aug. 4 of negligent homicide and four counts of child abuse in her
son’s death. She was tried for first-degree murder and child abuse.
Sonenberg, pleading for leniency, said his client
has “enormous community support from individuals who “know Diane
better than we could determine over the course of this trial.”
Marsh, he said, was a “source of inspiration to
others in her efforts to better her family,” whom her pastor describes
as “always calm, gracious and quiet” and “a model of motherly love.”
Sonenberg said Marsh “regularly participated in all
programming that was available to her. She’s not psychotic, she’s not
immature, she’s not addicted to drugs. She was not in denial. She was
seeking the services of the community.”
According to court records, Marsh stopped
counseling and parenting classes and refused contact with Child
Protective Services in 2006, took her son out of school in September
2006, and moved into a motel for a while with two homeless people. She
also abused the boy over a period of six months, tying him up,
scalding his feet and legs, and routinely giving him high doses of
adult over-the-counter sleeping medication, according to records in
the case.
A teary and angry Melvin Williams, Brandon’s father
and Marsh’s ex-husband, asked the judge to sentence Marsh to prison
for her crimes. He said he imagines his son wondering, “Why is my mom
doing this to me? She’s supposed to protect me.”
Campoy told Marsh she is “in denial” if she
believes her own testimony that she did nothing directly to harm her
son. She blamed her co-defendant, Flower Tompson, who this week was
sentenced to 10 years in prison for her part in the boy’s abuse and
death.
Campoy said neither Marsh nor Tompson and her
companion, Mark Lee Moss, a convicted child abuser, have told the
truth.
He dismissed Marsh’s own teary plea for leniency,
though he acknowledged her “genuine remorse.”
“I’m not the same person now that I was then,” she
told the judge.
Campoy said the jury had showed her compassion
enough, by finding her guilty of the lesser charge of negligent
homicide, rather than first-degree murder. He also admonished her for
not telling the court, even at sentencing, the truth about who killed
Brandon.
Her recorded telephone conversations from jail
showed no sorrow for Brandon, Campoy said, but talk about religion and
casting out the devil.
She will get credit for 543 days served in the Pima
County Jail.
In an interview after Thursday’s sentencing, Melvin
Williams said that when he married Marsh in 1999, she was working full
time as a medical secretary. She previously received a medical
discharge from the Air Force after more than nine years of service.
He challenged the defense attorney’s assertion that
cognitive issues made it difficult for Marsh to care for an autistic
child.
She was smart enough, Williams said, to “test into
the Air Force, smart enough to attend Pima Community College and work
for five or six years as a medical secretary, and – as her own
attorney said – smart enough to sell . . . cosmetics on the side.”
“After we got a divorce, she was OK for a while and
then she just lost it,” he said. He last saw Brandon in September
2006.
Williams said he paid $488 a month in child support
for his son and that, when Marsh invited Moss and Tompson to live with
her, they survived on the child support and her Air Force disability
payments.
“That’s how come she didn’t want to give him up,”
he said referring to Marsh’s custody of Brandon. “It was the money.”
Williams said, however, he would have kept paying
child support if Marsh had handed the boy over to him. “She could have
the money, just give my son back to me, I don’t care.”
Williams said Marsh knew “she could bring Brandon
to me or bring him to his grandmother.”
Glenda Jackson, a member of Marsh’s church, came to
court in a wheelchair to show Marsh support during sentencing.
“She’s a good woman. She got involved with the
wrong people,” Jackson said. “She needs therapy, not prison.”
Dad, grandma furious at no life terms in boy’s
death
By Sheryl Kornman - TucsonCitizen.com
September 18, 2008
Who killed Brandon Williams?
Only Diane Lynn Marsh, the boy’s mother, and Flower
Tompson, her friend, know and they’re not telling.
Neither Tompson, 28, nor Marsh, 40, admitted to
inflicting the blow to the 5-year-old autistic boy’s skull that killed
him on March 22, 2007. Tompson took a plea deal to testify against
Marsh but never testified.
Hector Campoy, the Pima County Superior Court judge
who presided over both women’s cases, said Tuesday he believes the boy
died because one or both of them pushed Brandon’s head against a tile
floor.
The most time either of them likely will spend in
prison is 15 years.
Melvin Williams, Brandon’s father, and Mae West,
the boy’s paternal grandmother, say they are furious that Marsh and
Tompson won’t get more prison time.
Tompson and Marsh were each initially charged with
first-degree murder. Tompson’s common-law husband, Mark Lee Moss, 48,
was charged with four counts of failing to report child neglect.
Charges against Moss, a convicted child molester,
according to California prison records, were dropped last year because
there was not enough evidence to convict him and he invoked his Fifth
Amendment right against self-incrimination, David Berkman, the
county’s chief criminal deputy county attorney, said Tuesday. Moss
also refused to cooperate in the investigation without immunity from
prosecution.
Tompson pleaded guilty to one charge of child abuse
and was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison.
A jury convicted Marsh last month of negligent
homicide and four counts of child abuse. Jurors were not made
available to reporters to answer questions about why they found her
guilty of the lesser charge.
Berkman said Marsh can’t be retried on the more
serious first-degree murder charge because she can’t be tried twice
for the same crime.
Marsh will be sentenced Thursday and faces five to
15 years in prison.
“Flower should get life, both of them,” paternal
grandmother West said in a recent interview. “They tortured Brandon.
They should get life.”
At Tompson’s sentencing Tuesday, Campoy said
Tompson, Marsh and Moss are each responsible for what he called the
“torture” and death of Brandon.
The judge gave Tompson the maximum number of years
allowed in the plea deal. He wasn’t swayed by her claims of a rough
childhood and “itinerant lifestyle” as sufficient reason to give her a
lighter sentence.
The judge spotlighted instead “the extreme
emotional and physical abuse Brandon had to suffer prior to his death,
and the emotional harm and suffering by his family.”
“It’s extremely disturbing to see two women testify
the other is more responsible,” he said.
Campoy said he didn’t believe Tompson’s assertion
that she was manipulated by Marsh.
“The court rejects that,” he said, citing Marsh’s
IQ of 70.
“You can’t be a master manipulator and have an IQ
of 70,” Campoy said. “Ms. Marsh is a very malleable, very diffident
and very conforming type of human being.”
The judge said the fact that Brandon was autistic
“made the behavior of (Tompson) bewildering and terrifying” to the
child. “She definitely had a hand in that terror that ultimately led
to his death.”
Campoy also said he didn’t believe the defense
attorney’s assertion that “she thought she would teach Diane to be a
better mother and then things went terribly awry.”
According to prosecutors and the autopsy report,
besides the head injury, Brandon’s feet had been scalded in hot water,
he had numerous healing and healed wounds on his skin and he had been
tied and suspended from a bed frame.
Tompson called 911 at about 11:30 p.m. on March 21,
2007, to report that the boy had stopped breathing. He was pronounced
dead shortly after arriving at a local hospital. Initially, it was
said he died from a toxic dose of adult cold medication. But the
autopsy showed recent skull fractures and brain bleeding sufficient to
cause death.
Moss told detectives shortly after the death that
he heard the child bang his head against the wall in his bedroom for
25 minutes and didn’t do anything to help him. He said he was watching
TV, according to investigators.
He also told detectives that some weeks before, he
changed the lock on the boy’s bedroom door so Brandon couldn’t open it
from the inside.
Marsh testified at her trial that she met Tompson
through a mutual friend in August 2006. By month’s end, Tompson had
Marsh convinced she was involved in a satanic group that Marsh feared
would kill Brandon, she said.
Tompson told Marsh “satanic groups had to kill a
family member, persons who were true blood,” Marsh testified.
Within a couple of months of meeting Tompson, Marsh
testified, she became estranged from everyone she knew, including a
pastor she became convinced was part of the satanic group.
Campoy said he didn’t believe any of the testimony
at Marsh’s trial that witchcraft and the occult were somehow at fault
in the boy’s death. He said Marsh made up that defense as the case
went on.
Marsh had a history of child neglect before Brandon
was born, according to Child Protective Services, and had lost custody
of her two older boys after he was born. Agency staffers had been
working since 1995 with Marsh to improve her parenting skills.
That’s when she was found guilty of misdemeanor
child neglect of the two older boys, then ages 4 and 5. Marsh, who was
a senior airman at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, was referred to D-M’s
Family Advocacy Program and she retained custody of the children.
In 2005 and 2006, CPS placed her two older sons in
foster care after one child was accused of assaulting Brandon and
Melvin Williams was charged with choking one of the teen boys. He
received four years probation.
Marsh was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic pain
and depression and became unable to work.
Melvin Williams said in a recent interview he would
have taken his son if he knew Marsh didn’t want him and was abusing
him, but he didn’t know. After Marsh’s house burned down in 2006, he
lost contact with her.
Williams and Marsh divorced when Brandon was 2
years old. Marsh had physical custody and Williams saw the child on
weekends.
In December 2006, court documents show, Marsh’s CPS
supervisor knew Marsh was no longer cooperating with the agency. A
juvenile court judge, out of concern for his welfare, demanded the
agency find Brandon immediately. Agency workers failed to locate the
family after a handful of tries.
But a week before Brandon died, a sheriff’s deputy
investigating a missing person report by Marsh’s father, who had come
to town looking for her after not hearing from her for weeks, found
the family the same day. The deputy saw Brandon and interviewed Marsh.
The deputy left the child with Marsh but wrote a
report of the visit, asking for CPS to follow up on the boy’s bandaged
feet.
The report was sent by regular mail; Brandon was
dead before it arrived.
West said both women eventually will face their
final judgment.
“God knows who did it,” West said. “They still got
their day set with the Lord. God will have a talk with them. God is
looking down on them right now. They’re gonna suffer. Lord ain’t let
you do something like that.”
West often cared for Brandon on weekends with his
father.
West said when Brandon had “his routine and his
medication, he was calm.”
“He loved to go to school,” she said, though he did
act up sometimes because of his autism and she’d get a call from the
school.
“His teacher called me and I came to pick him up,”
she said. “I’d tell him, “You need to listen to the teacher.’
“He said, “OK, Grandma Mae.’ All you had to do was
talk to him,” she said, covering her face with a tissue as she began
to cry. “He was a very intelligent boy.”
Melvin Williams said his son “didn’t bang his head
enough to kill himself.”
He said Marsh called him from jail shortly after
her arrest and took responsibility for the death.
“She said ‘I’m sorry.’ She said she couldn’t give
me the details,” he said.
Mom of slain boy, 5, guilty of abuse, negligent
homicide
By A.J. Flick - TucsonCitizen.com
August 5, 2008
A Pima County jury Monday found Diane Lynn Marsh
guilty of negligent homicide in the death of her autistic 5-year-old
son, Brandon Williams.
She also was convicted of four counts of child
abuse.
Deputy County Attorney Shawn Jensvold said Monday
prosecutors will study whether Marsh can be retried for felony
first-degree murder.
Jurors didn’t indicate on verdict forms that they
found Marsh not guilty of felony first-degree murder, but instead
found her guilty of the lesser negligent homicide charge on a
second-degree murder form.
Jurors indicated on the fourth child abuse count
that they found the state had proved Marsh guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt of giving her son too much adult sleep medicine in March 2007,
but hadn’t proved she caused the head injury that precipitated his
death.
If sentenced on the convictions as they stand,
Jensvold said Marsh could get up to 11.5 years in prison or lifetime
on probation.
Pima County Superior Court Judge Hector Campoy set
a status conference for Aug. 26.
Marsh, 41, testified Thursday that every bad act
that happened to her son – being tied to his bedposts, having his feet
scalded in hot water and dying from a blow to the head – was the
result of her housemate Flower Tompson’s power over her.
Jensvold told jurors in his closing argument that
Marsh “probably snapped” because she wasn’t taking her medications for
depression and wasn’t giving Brandon his, which caused him to be more
hyperactive than usual.
Jensvold labeled as a smoke screen testimony by
Marsh regarding Marsh’s fear of a murderous satanic cult that was
supposedly after her and her son.
Tompson, 28, who didn’t testify, was indicted on
first-degree murder and child abuse charges, and agreed to plead
guilty to child abuse. She faces five to 15 years in prison when she
is sentenced Sept. 2.
This case and an unrelated one involving two Tucson
siblings were the focal point of an investigation into whether state
Child Protective Services could have prevented injury and death to the
children.
Mom blames housemate, fear of satanic cult for
son’s death
Autistic boy tied up, scalded, struck on head
By A.J. Flick - TucsonCitizen.com
August 1, 2008
Diane Lynn Marsh, a Tucson woman accused of abusing
and killing her 5-year-old autistic son, isn’t to blame for Brandon
Williams’ death in March 2007, her defense attorney says.
“She loved her son,” Pima County Assistant Public
Defender Steve Sonenberg said in his closing argument Thursday.
“She was a victim herself of mind control,”
Sonenberg said.
The jury received instructions Thursday and was to
start deliberations Friday.
Marsh, 41, testified earlier Thursday that every
bad act that happened to her son – being tied to his bedposts, having
his feet scalded in hot water and dying from a blow to the head – was
the result of her housemate Flower Tompson’s power over her.
Deputy Pima County Attorney Shawn Jensvold told
jurors in his closing argument that Marsh “probably snapped” because
she wasn’t taking her medications for depression and wasn’t giving
Brandon his, which caused him to be more hyperactive than usual.
“She clearly loved her son,” Jensvold said. “A
mother is supposed to love her son.
“Loving people do bad things when the circumstances
get tough,” Jensvold said.
Jensvold labeled as a smokescreen testimony by
Marsh regarding Marsh’s fear of a murderous satanic cult that was
supposedly after her and her son.
“The defense and anything else Miss Marsh said to
minimize her behavior is not a defense. They’re excuses,” Jensvold
said.
“There’s no excuse for tying a boy to a bed frame,
whether it’s to get out the satanic influences or teach him a lesson,
or put a child in scalding water until the skin on his feet peel off.
And it’s certainly no excuse for pushing a child down on a tile floor
and killing him,” Jensvold said.
Marsh is accused of first-degree murder and four
counts of child abuse in the death of her son.
Brandon was taken to a hospital March 22, 2007,
where he died of blunt force trauma to his head, chest, abdomen and
limbs, according to an autopsy report.
Tompson, 28, who didn’t testify, was indicted on
first-degree murder and child abuse charges, but agreed to plead
guilty to child abuse. She faces five to 15 years in prison when she
is sentenced Sept. 2.
Marsh testified she met Tompson through a mutual
friend in August 2006. By month’s end, Tompson had Marsh convinced she
was involved in a satanic group that Marsh feared would kill Brandon,
she said.
Tompson told Marsh “satanic groups had to kill a
family member, persons who were true blood” Marsh testified.
Within a couple of months of meeting Tompson, Marsh
testified, she became estranged from everyone she knew, including a
pastor she was convinced was part of the satanic group.
At one point, Marsh testified, she and Tompson took
a three-day trip to New Mexico, Colorado and Utah in search of “high
priests” whose license plate numbers they would give to a mysterious
juvenile probation officer in Tucson who would have them arrested.
Marsh never met the probation officer, saying she
just heard about him through Tompson.
Marsh testified she told friends she feared Brandon
would be killed by the satanic group.
“I was told Brandon was worth $3.4 million dead,”
Marsh said. “The groups wanted to kill him.”
“Groups?” Sonenberg asked.
“(For a) sacrifice,” Marsh said.
“Did you believe that?”
“Yes,” she said.
In late February or early March last year, Tompson
told Marsh to stick Brandon’s feet in hot water to teach him a lesson
about disrespecting her, Marsh said.
Brandon began crying and Marsh took his feet out,
she said.
“Flower said, ‘Get out of the way, I will show you
how to do it.’ She picked him up and stuck him in there,” Marsh said.
Brandon was screaming and thrashing for several
minutes while the skin burned from the bottom of his feet, Marsh
testified.
“I just stood there frozen,” Marsh said.
This case and an unrelated case involving two
Tucson siblings were the focal point of an investigation into whether
Child Protective Services could have prevented the children’s injuries
or deaths.
In the other case, Christopher Mathew Payne, 30,
and his live-in girlfriend, Reina Irene Gonzales, 24, are charged with
first-degree murder in the deaths of Payne’s children, Ariana, 4, and
Tyler, 5. Payne and Gonzales could face the death penalty if
convicted.
Prosecutors aren’t seeking death if Marsh is
convicted. If she is convicted of first-degree murder, she faces
either life in prison without parole or with parole possible after 25
years.
M.D.: Body of autistic 5-year-old covered in
bruises
By Sheryl Kornman - TucsonCitizen.com
May 25, 2007
The body of a 5-year-old autistic boy who died
March 22 was covered in bruises and more than two dozen white marks on
his skin that may have been old injuries, Pima County Medical Examiner
Bruce Parks said Thursday.
Parks was asked to explain some of the findings of
Dr. David C. Winston, who performed the autopsy March 23.
Brandon Williams’ body showed more than 30 flat
skin lesions on his shins, feet, the bend of his arms, his neck,
forehead, upper arms and elsewhere.
The marks, hypopigmented macules, were meticulously
measured and noted in Winston’s autopsy report.
Parks said the lesions are areas of “abnormal skin”
that may be the site of earlier healing.
What caused them? “That’s the big question,” he
said. “If (Dr. Winston) knew the cause, he would have said so.”
Causes of bruises on the boy’s forearms and bends
of his arms at the elbow could include “pressure by a ropelike
object,” Parks said. “I’m not saying that’s what caused it.”
Clothesline rope was among the items taken from the
boy’s home by investigators executing a search warrant, Sheriff’s
Department records state.
Brandon’s mother, Diane Marsh, 39, and Flower
Tompson, 27, who lived in Marsh’s home, have been charged with
first-degree murder and child abuse.
Winston declared Brandon’s death a homicide and the
result of blunt force trauma to the head, which fractured the back of
his skull and caused his brain to bleed, according to the autopsy
report released Wednesday.
Initial police reports stated the suspected cause
of death was an overdose of adult cold medication.
The autopsy report did show several drugs in
Brandon’s system, including five times the maximum therapeutic level
of Benadryl, an antihistamine that can also act as a sedative.
How the child died will be discussed at trial,
Parks said.
Marsh told investigators she tied him up to
discipline him, according to sheriff’s reports.
She also told investigators she put the boy’s feet
in scalding water. However, the autopsy report does not note burn
injuries to the feet.
Parks said “if there were obvious signs of burns
that would have been noted.”
Mae West, Brandon’s paternal grandmother, said
Thursday she was “shocked” to learn the boy died from a skull
fracture.
“It’s so sad. I can’t believe it,” she said in an
interview. “No kid deserves that.”
West said Diane Marsh, her former daughter-in-law,
had always taken good care of Brandon.
“When I knew her, she didn’t do that crazy stuff.”
She said she, Brandon’s father, Melvin Williams,
and his uncle, Paul West, last saw Brandon in September 2006.
Liz Barker Alvarez, the state’s spokeswoman for
Child Protective Services, said she could not comment directly on the
autopsy report.
“Any person who heard a child had been injured that
way would be horrified and sad,” she said Thursday.
She said the agency did not have an open case file
on the boy at the time of his death.
However, a Pima County sheriff’s deputy
investigating Brandon’s death wrote in a report that a CPS
investigator told him on March 22 that the agency had an “open” case
file on Brandon’s family as of Oct. 31.
Barker Alvarez was asked on Thursday to provide a
summary of CPS involvement with the boy. State law says summaries must
be provided after a child’s death if requested.
Barker Alvarez denied the request, saying the Pima
County Attorney’s office asked CPS not to release the summary. But
Rick Unklesbay, chief trial counsel in the Pima County Attorney’s
Office, said the county attorney has “no legal authority over CPS.”
He said the county attorney’s office wrote to CPS
asking it not to release information that “would be detrimental to the
prosecution of the (Brandon Williams murder) case.”
Barker Alvarez said Thursday she could not disclose
why a CPS investigator tried to visit Marsh’s home in October 2006
after Brandon failed to show up for school for eight days.
The investigator said she saw the boy’s mother
driving away from the family home and she lost the vehicle in traffic,
according to a sheriff’s investigator’s report.
Barker Alvarez said Thursday the investigator asked
both the sheriff’s department and Tucson police for help in tracking
the vehicle.
A March sheriff’s report, however, states that the
CPS investigator said she contacted only the sheriff’s office and that
deputies lost the vehicle in traffic once it entered Tucson police
jurisdiction. Barker Alvarez said the attempt to see the boy in
October was not the only one, that CPS investigators had made
“numerous” attempts in the fall of last year to contact Marsh.
A week before Brandon died, a sheriff’s deputy
responding to a 911 call from Marsh’s father, Donald Marsh, and a
family friend, who were concerned about Marsh’s and the boy’s welfare
because they hadn’t seen them for weeks, contacted Marsh and Brandon
at their Northwest Side home.
The deputy saw the boy wrapped with cloth bandages
around the legs and noted Marsh appeared “nervous,” according to her
report.
Marsh told the deputy he fell on cactus, the report
said. The deputy wrote that Marsh and Brandon appeared well fed and
well rested and she closed the “welfare check” case.
Authorities: Dead boy was heavily medicated,
showed signs of being tied up
By David L. Teibel - TucsonCitizen.com
March 22, 2007
At the time of his death, 5-year-old Brandon
Williams had marks on his wrists and ankles, “ligature marks” showing
he had been tied up a times, said Sheriff’s Bureau Chief Richard
Kastigar, head of investigations for the Pima County Sheriff’s
Department.
The boy had blisters on his feet and some bleeding,
Kastigar said.
Brandon’s mother Diane Marsh, 39, who was arrested
this morning on suspicion of first-degree murder, told detectives she
had bound her son and at times immersed his feet “in scalding hot
water” to discipline him, Kastigar said.
She also told detectives she gave him large amounts
of sleep-inducing pain medication, five or six adult strength pills in
the morning and a similar dose at night, Kastigar said.
But on the night Brandon died, Kastigar said, Marsh
told detectives she had given Brandon some cold medicine and 12
Tylenol PM pills, all at one time, around 7 p.m. Wednesday.
When medics were called to the home, they found the
boy unresponsive and in full cardiac arrest, Kastigar said. They tried
to resuscitate the boy while rushing him to Northwest Medical Center.
A forensic pathologist called to the hospital after
Brandon died said the medications the boy was given would be an
overdose amount for a child, Kastigar said.
Marsh’s live-in friend, Flower Tompson, told
detectives that at times she helped “medicate” the boy and that she
also had seen Brandon’s mother beat him at times with a clothing
hanger, Kastigar said.
Tompson’s common-law husband, Mark Lee Moss,
Kastigar said, is not suspected of abusing the child, but he never
reported the abuse he witnessed, as required by law.
Tompson told detectives she never reported the
abuse because she and Moss had been homeless and were taken in by
Marsh. Tompson said she didn’t want to do anything that would endanger
her and Moss’s living arrangement with Marsh, Kastigar said.
Marsh has two other sons, one 17 and the other 15,
who have been removed from her custody by state Child Protective
Services, Kastigar said.
That stemmed from an incident at another home Marsh
and her children lived at in the 1000 block of West Wheatridge Drive.
In that Aug. 29 incident deputies were called to
the home and found that the older son, who then was 16, had grabbed
Brandon by the face. The older boy was arrested on suspicion of
assaulting Brandon, Kastigar said.
The Wheatridge Drive home caught fire in December
and an insurance company placed Marsh and Brandon in the Silver Stream
Way home until the burned home could be repaired, Kastigar said. He
said the fire was not of suspicious origin.
