By Madeline Buckley, Sam Charles
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Two men used bottles of hand sanitizer to start a fire in an empty, vacant building, prosecutors alleged, and then the owner fraudulently filed an insurance claim, pretending the residence was occupied by renters and filled with furniture, equipment and tools.
The fire, though, quickly spread to two neighboring homes where people slept and ultimately killed Chicago firefighter Jermaine Pelt, who had responded to douse the blaze.
After more than a yearlong, multiagency investigation, Cook County prosecutors charged Martez Cristler, 22, of Hammond, and Nicholas Virgil, 37, of Riverdale, with murder and arson. Anthony Moore, 47, of Blue Island, is charged with wire fraud, insurance fraud and forgery.
During a court appearance Friday at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Judge David Kelly ordered Cristler and Virgil detained while awaiting trial. He released Moore, who was not charged with an offense that allows for detention.
“There are charges that come before this court that are so serious and so tragic that the court would need to be assured and confident that it would not happen again,” Kelly told Cristler and Virgil at the end of a lengthy detention hearing. “Based on facts and circumstances … this court is not confident that any condition short of detention would be appropriate at this time.”
Chicago firefighters crowded into the courtroom to observe the proceedings. Pelt’s parents attended, as well.
The hearing was interrupted briefly when the mother of one of the defendants began shouting, “I can’t take this. My son didn’t do this (expletive)” as deputies ushered her outside.
On April 4, 2023, Jermaine Pelt, 49, was called to a frame house on the South Wallace Street block in the West Pullman neighborhood, where a heavy fire consumed the second floor and in the attic at about 2:30 a.m.
Neighbors awoke because of the smoke and heat, Assistant State’s Attorney Mike Pekara said, with one reporting they believed it to be daytime because of the brightness and intensity of the flames.
Pelt was assigned to take a hose line into one of the neighboring buildings that caught fire, but firefighters later evacuated due to dangerous smoke conditions. Once outside, Pekara said, they realized Pelt wasn’t with them, and a team went back in. They found him on the ground with debris on top of him and his mask dislodged.
He died later at a hospital.
“They set that building on fire sandwiched between other occupied residences in the middle of the night with no regard whatsoever for the safety of people in those neighboring buildings,” Pekara said. “It shows the absolute dangerousness of these individuals.”
Investigators determined the fire was intentionally set, and detected the scent of hand sanitizer, Pekara said.
Detectives then pieced together what happened using surveillance footage, license plate readers and cellphone records, he said. The records showed the men called each other before and after the fire, and that their phones were in the vicinity, Pekara said. Footage showed that cars associated with the men were in the area.
Bottles of hand sanitizer were found in a dumpster near a barber shop owned by Moore, prosecutors said.
Moore filed an insurance claim on the residence, and proffered a lease agreement that attested to a loss of rental income, Pekara said. Witnesses, though, who saw the property before the fire reported it was empty and “unlivable,” he said.
Defense attorneys for the men asked Kelly not to order detention, arguing that prosecutors had no proof that the men used the phones that pinged cell towers or drove the vehicles that showed up on surveillance tape. They additionally pointed to the minimal criminal history of Virgil and the nonexistent record of Cristler.
“Nobody at any point states they saw Mr. Virgil himself or anyone resembling Mr. Virgil,” Assistant Public Defender Molly Schranz said.
Pekara countered, though, that circumstantial evidence is still evidence, and said the circumstantial evidence is “absolutely overwhelming.”
Kelly found the evidence sufficient, noting that there was a “connecting of dots” done by investigators. Though he said some details of the case are “nonviolent in nature,” the recklessness led to the death of a firefighter.
“This is a reckless disregard for human life,” he said. “People are asleep in their respective homes.”
Records from the Cook County clerk’s office and Illinois Secretary of State show that a company registered to Moore bought the property at 12017 S. Wallace St. in 2021.
Moore’s arrest report lists State Farm Insurance as the victim in the incident.
A Tribune reporter spoke with Moore last year shortly after the fire, and he said he was in the process of rehabbing the property as a rental unit.
Moore previously told the Tribune that he received several phone calls from a neighbor across the street who told him his building caught fire after the blaze spread from the property to the north.
“I couldn’t see what was going on because everything was going up in flames when I got there,” Moore told the Tribune a few hours after the fire. “It’s a nightmare. I’ve been working to finally get it (the property) together and just keep on moving, you know, get some tenants in there and keep going.”
Though both the Fire Department and Moore said the fire started at 12015 S. Wallace, the owner of that property told the Tribune last year that he believed the blaze started in Moore’s building.
“They probably got the address wrong,” the neighbor said at the time. “If it started in my building, how (did the other) building burn up, but mine didn’t?”
Pelt was born and raised in the West Pullman neighborhood, the same area where he worked as a firefighter. He walked his only daughter down the aisle months before he was killed, family members said.
“He had a devotion to this job and this neighborhood,” said Capt. Rory Ohse after his death.
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