Warehouse Owners Offers Land As Memorial

The Associated Press

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) -- The owner of a warehouse where six firefighters died battling a blaze is offering the land for a permanent tribute.

``As far as I am concerned, the land on which that building stood has been consecrated by their acts of heroism,'' owner Ding On Kwan wrote in a letter to city officials.

The six men died Dec. 3 while trying to save homeless people believed to be inside the burning building.

The city is considering Kwan's offer, City Manager Thomas Hoover said, but first Kwan must continue to remove the crumbling rubble.

``Once that's done, then we'd be more than happy to work with Mr. Kwan on his offer,'' Hoover said.

At the warehouse site Tuesday, a state police lieutenant suffered minor cuts and bruisers when an interior brick wall collapsed on him. Martin Fay was part of a team of workers who continued to comb for clues to what caused the fire.

Meanwhile, Julie Ann Barnes, 19, one of the homeless people accused of causing the inferno, was ruled competent to face the manslaughter charges. Barnes and her boyfriend, Thomas S. Levesque, 37, face six counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the dead firefighters.

The two were fighting when they knocked over a candle in the vacant warehouse, prosecutors said. Virgil Larose, who took Barnes in a few years ago, said she knocked the candle over after Levesque slapped her.

``She went to stand up and knocked the candle over,'' he said outside court.

Levesque's psychiatric evaluation was continuing. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.