Vandal starts fire at Buffalo House

By Cara Quackenbush

Early Sunday morning, the six tenants of 635 Washington St., otherwise known as "Buffalo," were rudely awakened by a fire lapping at the 12-foot branches of the giant mulberry tree in their back yard .

Set by an unidentified arson, the fire destroyed the residents' barbecue, stereo, and twin couches, and came dangerously close to igniting a nearby wood pile, a parked car, and the neighbor's wooden fence.

Senior Mateusz Sawka and his roommate were the first to see the fire from the second story of their house two doors down.

"It was massive. We ran over there and saw that it was covering a good portion of their backyard," he said.

One student immediately found a fire extinguisher while the others woke their sleeping neighbors.

"Mitch is the real hero of the story," August Sebastiani said of his friend, senior Mitch Hirschbach who grabbed a hose and extinguished the last remaining flames. "He had the flames out before the fire department even arrived."

The fire began after residents had gone to bed at about 2:15 a.m. leaving the coals from their midnight barbecue unattended. Sometime between 2:15 a.m. and 3 a.m, when the fire was first spotted, someone crept into the backyard and tipped over the barbecue.

The vandal proceeded to place one of the house's two couches on top of the fire, set the other couch on fire, and break a floor lamp nearby. The vandal's only signature was a couple of broken boards in the fence separating Buffalo from the Sigma Pi house next door.

Not surprisingly, the incident left the house's residents feeling surprised and angry, and without any clue as to who could have started it.

Sebastiani described the incident as unfortunate and scary. "I don't think a student would do this to another student," he said.

"We don't have any enemies," senior tenant Michael Rivera added.

But when the residents reported the incident to the police the following morning they were not pleased with the their response: not only did the police decide not to file a report or go to the house to check it out, the residents were told that there was nothing the police would do to find the perpetrator because the fire was left unattended.

Rivera and Sebastiani thought that such a response to a deliberate and potentially harmful act of vandalism was disproportionate to the many police cars that were sent to their neighbors' house earlier that night to break up a typical weekend party.

Senior Buffalo House resident Tex Muldoon was most alarmed by the police's reasoning behind their lack of action.

"By that logic, if my neighbor's house was left open and no one was home, then I can break in and steal stuff and its still their fault," he said.

In addition, he found the police's refusal to take action against the vandals especially ironic in light of their off-campus cooperation effort earlier that afternoon.

"They came around earlier in the day to try and foster cooperation between students and police," Muldoon said, speaking of the collaborative "Police Walk" put on by the Santa Clara Police Department and the Associated Students Saturday afternoon to encourage a respectful relationship between students, homeowners and police.

"This is not cooperation."

According to Santa Clara Police Officer Jake Malae, however, the department never actually received the call and confirmed that no report had been filed.

Instead, although the phone number the tenants used was listed on the fliers the department handed out that afternoon as a legitimate contact number, he believes it was that of a dispatcher, not of the police department.

He said the dispatcher must not have deemed the call important enough to report or investigate, and added that he felt badly that the situation was not given more attention.

But more than anything, the residents of 635 Washington St. agreed that the scariest part of the incident is that they now have reason to fear for their safety.

"If they can do this, what's to stop them from doing it again, especially when the cops don't seem too concerned," Rivera said.

"That fire could have burned down our house and taken Dog House and Sigma Pi with it," Muldoon added.