It was after 2 a.m. on March 25, 1993, when Barbara Paris heard footsteps coming from the back of her South Side Chicago apartment on South Albany Street. A moment later, she smelled gasoline. Paris asked her husband, who, like Barbara, is legally blind, to investigate. When he got to the door, he called to his wife, “The door is hot, the house is on fire. Let’s get out.”
The couple’s 14-year-old daughter, Kasey, led her father out the front door. Their older son, Scott, was not home. Barbara stayed behind to alert the elderly upstairs neighbors, Peter McGinnis and Margaret Mesa. She shouted into the phone, “Get out! The house is on fire!” over the shrill of glass shattering and wood collapsing. Mesa, who was hard of hearing, couldn’t understand her.
Bright flames made the whole place look like daylight to Barbara, despite the fact that she could barely see. She pleaded with Mesa as she felt the fire getting closer. Forced to drop the phone and flee, she raced outside and heard Mesa and McGinnis cry out from the second-floor windows: “Help us, please!”
When they got to the second floor, rescue team members stumbled over Mesa's and McGinnis’s bodies in the bedroom. They were pronounced dead about an hour later at the hospital.
Mesa's and McGinnis’s deaths in the spring of 1993 came at a particularly volatile period for the city of Chicago. In 1993, the total number of violent and property crimes, like arson, peaked according to statistics supplied by the city’s police department to the FBI. The South Albany Street fire joined this list. The case was ruled an arson, and therefore, the two deaths were classified as homicides.
Three years later, when that suspect was convicted of double-murder and arson, the families affected by the tragedy thought justice had been done.
The investigation progressed quickly. Within hours of the fire, the key evidence was gathered. That same day a suspect was arrested, interrogated, and, after he confessed, charged. Three years later, when that suspect was convicted of double-murder and arson, the families affected by the tragedy thought justice had been done.
However, 23 years later, advances in fire science evidence have led many — including the Cook County circuit court — to question whether the investigators made the right call about what really happened on the night of March, 25, 1993. And this June, a man who has spent most of his life in prison may get a chance to prove his innocence.
Out in the street that night, a crowd had grown. Scott raced home from a nearby bar to find his sister and parents outside; they did not think this fire was an accident. In fact, the Paris family already had a suspect in mind: Kasey’s ex-boyfriend Adam, who she said had made threats against her since she started dating his best friend, Mel Gonzales.
Fourteen-year-old Adam Gray and his mother, Gertraud, lived across the street. As the fire raged, Gertraud was awakened by the thick smell of smoke and the commotion outside. When she came outside, Scott immediately confronted her.
“I hope to fucking god Adam didn't do this,” Scott sneered.
The house where the Paris and Mesa families lived in Chicago.
Alex Wroblewski for BuzzFeed News
Fire investigator Joe Gruszka arrived at the fire at 3:20 a.m., shortly after it had been put out. The Chicago Fire Department would have been hard-pressed to assign somebody with a better résumé to this fire than Gruszka. A 20-plus-year veteran, he had spent half his career in the department’s Office of Fire Investigation. He was certified in arson investigation by the state’s fire marshal office. He was also member of the International Association of Arson Investigators. Gruszka had been to over 20,000 fires in his career, and worked to determined the cause and origin of about 5,000.
When he got to the back of the house, Gruszka observed that the fire had totally consumed the wooden stairs that led up to the Paris family’s apartment. All that was left were charred remains.
When Gruszka inspected the blackened debris, he observed “alligatoring” in the wood — shiny, raised blisters that gave the wood the appearance of a scaly alligator back. In the world of arson investigation, the presence of “alligator char” was commonly believed to indicate an accelerant had been used.
The scene of the fire at 4139 S. Albany St.
Courtesy University of Chicago Exoneration Project
Gruszka went to his car and retrieved his hydrocarbon detector — a device, he would later testify in court, that when applied to an area where an accelerant is present “will just start buzzing like crazy.” When he held it to the stairs, he said he got a “very strong response.”
Gruszka had also inspected the fuse boxes and some exposed wiring in the house. He saw nothing that suggested this had been an electrical fire.
Chicago Police also sent its arson unit to investigate. Detective Ernie Rokosik, a 20-year veteran on the force with more than 10 years in the unit and 2,000 fires under his belt, arrived at the scene about 4:15 a.m.
One of the observations Rokosik made was heavy charring at the ground level of the stairway, commonly thought to be an indicator that an accelerant had been applied to the floor. (The logic is that that fire travels upward, so in any common fire the heat and flames would rise and the floor would be spared.) Rokosik’s team took two debris samples — one from the base of the staircase, and one from the rear door of the first-floor apartment — to be transported to the crime lab.
All the evidence was coalescing into a case. Rokosik and Gruszka were pretty certain that an arsonist had doused the stairs leading up to the Parises' apartment with accelerant then lit the blaze.
Thanks to Kasey Paris, who had spilled the details of her ill-fated teenage romance with Adam Gray, the police also had a lead on a possible suspect.
Mike Gray, Adam's brother.
Alex Wroblewski for BuzzFeed News
Twenty-three years later, Adam Gray’s memory of March 25, 1993, is “crystal clear,” he told BuzzFeed News in an interview at Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg, Illinois.
He spent the night at his friend Mel Gonzales' house. Adam brought his Super Nintendo controllers and games, but he forgot the console, so the boys spent the night drawing. At 10 p.m., Family Feud came on. After they watched the game show, the boys went to sleep in the front room of the apartment.
Around 4 a.m., Adam's brother, Mike Gray, and mother showed up in an agitated state.
Mike asked Adam, repeatedly, “Where you been at?”
“What do you mean? I’ve been here sleeping,” Adam told Mike.
Looking at Adam's zombie-like appearance and the imprint of a quilted blanket on his face, Mike believed his brother. He insisted Adam come with him to his place where he would be safe from the “lynch mob” combing the neighborhood for him.
When Mike answered his door at 6 a.m., he was greeted by two plainclothes detectives. The officers told him they needed to take his brother down to the station to ask him a few questions. Mike told Adam to take his books and bag so he could head straight to school after he talked to the cops.
“So I explained that to the cops. And they were like, 'Well, what’d you do then?’ I was like, 'The fuck you mean I do then? I went to sleep.’”
Adam knew that he was being taken in for questioning about the fire. Still, in his mind he had nothing to hide.
“To me, it’s Kasey, we’ve been beefing for six months before that,” Adam Gray said. “So that had no credibility in my mind. She’s bullshitting.”
Gray was put in an interview room on the second floor of the station at 51st and Wentworth. He remembers the silhouettes of people going in and out of the room on the other side of the two-way mirror, which he thought was kind of cool.
Around 7:30 a.m., a group of investigators led by Assistant State’s Attorney James Brown and Chicago Police Detective Nick Crescenzo came into the room. Brown read Gray his rights off a little card, then asked him if he would be willing to talk about the previous night. He said no problem. He told the investigators that he spent the night at Gonzales' house, about forgetting his Nintendo console, watching Family Feud, and going to sleep around 10.
“So I explained that to the cops and they were like, 'Well, what’d you do then?' I was like, 'The fuck you mean I do then? I went to sleep,'” Gray said.
The investigators continued to push Gray on what he did after he went to sleep. When he started to cry, they left him alone for a bit. This went on for hours. Each time they asked him, Gray maintained he had nothing to do with the fire. Asked if he ever requested a lawyer or to see his brother or mother — who both said that they were at the station that morning trying to get to him — he said he never thought to ask.
Later that morning, Gonzales arrived at 51st and Wentworth and was taken into a separate room to be questioned. Gray was not aware during his interrogation that his best friend was also being questioned until investigators started confronting him with Gonzales' answers.
“That’s a lot of how they were mind-fucking me. They would come to me with some of the answers that I had given them and tell me, ‘Well, we talked to Mel, and Mel doesn’t remember watching Family Feud,'” Gray said.
Adam Gray at 14 years old.
Courtesy University of Chicago Exoneration Project
Pressed for information about Kasey Paris and Gray, Gonzales gave investigators what appeared to be a break in the investigation. He told them that nine months prior, Gray said he wanted to throw a bomb through Paris’s window.
According to Gray, after six hours of interviews, Detective Crescenzo came in and spoke to him alone. “He said, 'Look, man, I believe you, I believe that you didn’t have anything to do with it. The only way you’re going to get out of it is if you basically say that you did it,'” Gray said. “So I said, 'OK, I did it.'” (Crescenzo later testified that he never spoke to Adam alone that morning and denied that he ever coerced him to confess.)
After that, Gray remembers the attitude inside the station changed. Gray said the assistant state’s attorney came into the room smiling and said to him, “You have something you want to tell me?” He said he proceeded to “ad lib” an explanation.
Gray told the investigators that at 2 a.m. he snuck out of Gonzales' house. In the alley, he grabbed a discarded plastic gallon milk jug. Then he walked half a block to the Clark gas station. At Clark, Gray filled up the jug with two dollars' worth of gas and made his way to 4139 S. Albany St., where Paris lived. He said he entered through the back door and doused the wooden stairs with gasoline. After he ignited the gas with a lighter, he ran back to Gonzales' house, tossing the jug in an alley along the way. When he got back to Gonzales' place, he smashed the lighter, flushed it down the toilet, and went back to sleep. Investigators got him McDonald’s while they waited for the statement to be transcribed so he could sign.
One puzzling detail that emerged later on after tests were run on the debris from the scene was that no gasoline was found. Nevertheless, Adam signed the statement and was transferred to Chicago’s juvenile corrections center, nicknamed the "Audy Home." After being locked up for the night, the most crushing moment for him came the next day when he met his lawyer.
“He told me, ‘Look, man, you’re going to be sitting here at least 10 or 11 months with what you’re facing.' That, to me, it was too much to handle. I became suicidal after that.”
Gray remained at the juvenile center for three years until he turned 17, when he was sent to the Cook County Jail to await trial for the murders of Peter McGinnis and Margaret Mesa.
Alex Wroblewski for BuzzFeed News
Gray’s trial began in April 1996. Prosecutors portrayed him as a rage-filled teenager who had reached a boiling point because of his unrequited affection for Kasey Paris.
Paris testified that Gray forced her to break up with Gonzales, then continued to threaten to hurt both of them if they ever got back together. She told the court that for months he had skulked around their neighborhood yelling vile statements at her, like, “You’re going to die, die, die” and “You bitch, you’re a whore.” She said that the day before the fire, Gray told her to watch her back. (Gray does not dispute that he told Paris to break up with Gonzales months before the fire, but says that he didn’t speak to her after that and denies threatening her.)
Other witnesses for the prosecution corroborated the details of Gray’s signed confession. Brenda Thomas, a Clark gas station attendant, testified that she sold him $2 of gas that night at 2 a.m. Then, the next night when the police came to see her, she identified Gray out of a set of Polaroid pictures of young boys from the neighborhood.
The Clark gas station where Adam Gray allegedly bought gasoline the night of the fire.
Alex Wroblewski for BuzzFeed News
Crescenzo testified that while the assistant state’s attorney was taking Gray’s statement, he left the police station and went to the scene where he recovered a gallon milk jug that matched the description Gray gave of the container. He told the court he found it in the vicinity of where Gray said he'd tossed it and it smelled like gasoline.
In court, Assistant State’s Attorney James Brown read Gray’s statement aloud to the jury. It concluded with this exchange:
“Now, could you tell me why you did what you did with the gasoline?”
“Because I wanted to kill her.”
“Kill who?”
“Kasey.”
Both Crescenzo and Brown testified that at no time did they pressure Gray into confessing.
For the defense, 16-year-old Mel Gonzales testified that Gray had never threatened him or told him that he wanted to burn Paris’s house down. He said that morning the police showed up at his house at around 8 a.m. and took him to 51st and Wentworth. He said investigators questioned him “seven or nine” times.
Gonzales testified that the investigators “asked me if I love my parents to tell them what they want to hear, or they would put me in jail for the rest of my life.” After that, he said that Gray said he was going to throw a bomb through Paris's window. Gonzales said that he didn’t take the bomb threat seriously. And when the prosecutor asked him on the stand if he was afraid of Gray, he said no.
Gonzales, his sister, and his mother all testified that they had no knowledge of Gray sneaking out of their house that night to start the fire. If he had snuck out and snuck back in, he hadn't woken anybody up.
When it came time to discuss the evidence from the scene at 4139 S. Albany St., investigators Rokosik and Gruszka took the stand and outlined the visual observations they had made that night that suggested arson.
But Gray told BuzzFeed News that “for a glimmer I started to have a hope at the trial” when the crime lab technician testified that there was no gas found at the scene. A Chicago Police criminologist said his tests on the samples taken by Rokosik revealed heavy petroleum distillates (HPDs) with a high boiling point average. His tests on the milk jug also showed the presence HPDs, but with a medium boiling point average. Neither matched the composition of gasoline, which has a low boiling point average.
At his sentencing, the prosecutor asked the judge to “contain the fire within Adam Gray” and put him away for life.
If there was no gas, this fire could not have happened the way Gray said it did in his confession. Gray said his lawyer told him privately that he had a good chance.
That’s not how it played out. The state insisted that while the test results didn’t show gasoline, the chemicals in the debris and milk jug showed the presence of an accelerant. This, plus the investigators’ testimonies that there were visual clues of arson at the scene and Adam’s confession, was enough for the jury.
At his sentencing, the prosecutor asked the judge to “contain the fire within Adam Gray” and put him away for life.
They needn’t have asked. Because the crime was felony murder, Adam received an automatic sentence of life without parole.
An example of alligator char.
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