A family from Riversdale on the Placencia Peninsula is homeless tonight as they mourn the home and the pets they lost in a terrible fire. And what makes the situation even more painful is that they believe it was arson, a long-time threat realized to devastating effect.
That fire and the memory of it has tormented 24-year-old Zulma Aguirre who says she can't even begin to recover from the financial and emotional damage that has been done by the man who she claims set her house on fire. She spoke to me via phone just minutes before the news. Here's what she said about the worse day of her life.
Voice of: Zulma Aguirre, Victim of Fire
"Around 12:58 to be exact I received a call from a neighbour telling me that the house was on fire. I ask permission from my boss if I can leave from work to go and check the house. He said yes and I ran to my house. When I reach, the house was covered in flames. It was completely in fire. I try to open the door, because we had 3 dogs inside the house; a male husky, a female husky and a female chihuahua. 3 of them were inside. When I went and try to open the door, the key just melts. Everything was burning and I couldn't open the door. Somebody else from the community came to help me. One of them grab a big post and he opened the door, but it was already too late. The fire had already taken over everything."
"I just fell on my knees and I started to scream. I knew it was him, because I was filing so many police reports. The day when he attempted to kill our dogs, when he went in our property and threw sausages I spoke to the inspector from Seine Bight, Mr. Hilbert Martinez and I ask him to please do something. Nothing was done. They didn't show up when he did that, so I just kept filing more reports against him. We haven't recovered. It's a tragedy that we can't recover and we are pleading, we want justice. We want him to go to jail. They are saying that they will get away. We are still getting threats. Just today he said that this is not over, because we filed a report and that we want to send him to jail, that he will come and finish what his brother couldn't do. So we fear for our lives and that why we want this to go on the news so that there is evidence. From the past we haven't been receiving much help from the police, until now we are seeing more results. We want something to stay as evidence that we try to voice what is happening to us."
Aguirre says that since 2021 when he threatened to kill her dogs, she has filed multiple police reports against the alleged arsonist but to no avail.
Police say the house had an estimated value of about $100,000 Belize dollar.
