Sacramento Firefighters Recall Being Thrown by Blast

Sacramento city firefighter Jeffrey Coats pulled the kinks out of the hose to make sure it was ready in case the situation blew. He smelled natural gas. Everybody smelled fumes the second they drove up to the house on 25th Avenue. They could smell them from the street.

His partner and two other firefighters poked around the front porch. It was when they pried and knocked the front door open in search of the gas leak that a fiery explosion tore the house apart, lifted Coats off his feet and shot him through the air.

"My feet were not on the ground," Coats testified Tuesday in Sacramento Superior Court. "It knocked me into a fence where I then landed on the ground."

Crawling away from the July 5, 2010, explosion and the noise and debris that rained down on him and his three fellow firefighters, Coats, screaming in pain, looked at the horror that had engulfed the ends of his arms.

"I saw the skin on my hands falling off," he said.

According to prosecutors, Coats and the rest of the crew walked up on an empty house in Oak Park that had been rigged for a fiery demise by next-door neighbor Robert William Durst, 46.

Authorities said Durst, now on trial on an arson charge and five other felony counts, was upset because he had done some trench work on a plumbing job at the house the previous year for which the owner hadn't paid him in full.

When investigators combed through the wreckage of the house in the 3800 block of 25th Avenue, they found a red candle with an apple cinnamon scent decorated with candy droplets befitting a cupcake. They said it had been set and lit for a slow burn in the northwest corner of the living room.

On the other side of the house, they found a gas valve in the kitchen that was supposed to feed the stove. The valve had been opened to full throttle, according to city fire investigators.

When firefighters opened the front door of the house at 9:54 a.m., the oxygen swirled the gas that had built up in layers of increasing density from floor to attic. When fumes met flame, they blew the roof up, the walls out and the firefighters off their feet.

All four firefighters suffered serious burns to their hands and faces. Three, including Coats, were sent to UC Davis Medical Center in excruciating pain, they testified Tuesday. They remained hospitalized for a week and were in pain several weeks after that.

Durst faces one count of arson, two counts of burglary, two counts of receiving stolen property and one count of being an ex-con in possession of a firearm. He picked up the property crimes, authorities said, for stealing a ceiling fan and a water heater from the house before he allegedly turned the place into a bomb awaiting ignition.

Richard Cohen, the defendant's attorney, said Durst is likely to testify at the trial.

In an interview with police 15 days after the explosion, Durst said he only meant to "burn the roof up, burn the ceiling, and burn the carpet up." He said he did not mean to injure the firefighters. He said, "I feel really bad" and that "never, never, never, never in a million years did I think about doing something like that."

On Tuesday, Deputy District Attorney Rod Norgaard showed jurors pictures of the injuries sustained by the firefighters. Their hands were burned raw, their faces blistered, their ears, lips and noses turned molten red.

Coats got the worst of it. His left ear swelled to three times its normal size. He had to keep his hands elevated above his heart to stop the throbbing. Infections from the burns to his head abscessed and had to be cut and cleaned. He bled when he scratched an itch. He couldn't venture into sunlight.

The worst part was shaving, a torture he endured to prevent hair follicles from becoming infected. "One shaving would take four or five razors because you couldn't get all the skin off the razors," Coats testified.

Upon arrival at the Oak Park two-bedroom with the decorative rock front, firefighter Michael Feyh went around back and turned off the gas. Then he met his partner, Scott McKinney, on the front porch. McKinney had a pry bar. Feyh had a shoulder. He put his shoulder into the door and stumbled about four feet inside.

"Directly to my front right, I saw what looked like a small flash, a Fourth-of-July firework type of flash ... a small explosion," Feyh testified. He said he knew right away, "things were going bad."

"I heard a metallic sound -- zzzzzz," something he thought he'd heard before. "I likened it to the movie 'Backdraft,' " he said, describing a rapid whoosh of expanding air preparing to erupt.

"A searing heat kind of took over, and that's the last thing I remember," Feyh said.

Firefighter David Storck testified that when he saw Feyh outside, his "hair was a different color. It was melted almost to his head." Storck avoided more serious injury by diving away from the house. He was able to get out of the hospital that day.

Feyh, like Coats, spent a week hospitalized, as did McKinney, who was hit in the face by a porch post that broke his nose. He stood burned, bleeding and cussing in the street.

"I've been to gas leaks before," McKinney testified. "This never happens."

The trial is expected to take until the end of the month in Judge Marjorie Koller's courtroom, with the prosecution likely to present its case through the end of next week. Durst's wife and stepdaughter are scheduled to testify today.

Copyright 2012 - The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service