Chicago police on Sunday questioned a homeless woman they consider a “person of interest” in setting a Wrigleyville fire that killed four friends and severely injured another, all of whom traced their roots to Belvidere, Ill.
Charges had not been filed late Sunday against the woman, believed to be in her 40s, who police suspect set at least three small fires several hours before the nearby fatal blaze Saturday morning at an apartment building at 3553 N. Fremont St., police spokeswoman Monique Bond said.
“She had a very strong odor of smoke, which also led detectives to believe that she was involved,” Bond said. The woman appeared to be mentally unstable and made some self-incriminating statements, Bond added.
Meanwhile, the victims’ friends and relatives in Belvidere struggled to accept that their loved ones were gone. The fire killed the apartment’s two tenants and two of three friends visiting from the northern Illinois town.
One tenant, Jennifer Carlson, 24, was a single mom who was studying to become a massage therapist while working as a waitress to support her son. Her roommate, Jason Bowers, 23, was a recent college graduate with eyes on a career in investment banking. Friends said they always turned to him for financial advice.
Bowers was the glue that bound a loose circle of friends from Belvidere together, often inviting them to taste the urban life they loved and stay at the Wrigleyville apartment, family members said.
“He was kind of like the border between country and city,” John Bowers said of his brother. “If people got tired here in Belvidere, they could go to the city and see him. And he would come back here to see them when he got tired of the city.”
The Cook County medical examiner’s office could confirm Sunday only that Carlson died in the fire. The other three victims, all of whom appeared to be in their early 20s, could not immediately be confirmed because the bodies were too badly damaged by fire, and officials needed dental records to positively identify them.
Bowers’ family members, however, said Sunday that police have told them that both he and Carlson were killed in the fire.
The person of interest was arrested around midnight Saturday near Belmont Avenue and Broadway, Bond said. She matched a description released by police earlier in the day.
Residents of the block where the smaller fires occurred identified the woman as the one they saw setting them, Bond said.
The fatal fire was reported just before 7 a.m. Saturday in a three-story building that sits at Fremont and Addison Streets, authorities said. Carlson, Bowers and the three friends were in the only occupied unit on the third floor, in the rear of the building.
Police said the fire appeared to have started in a stairwell between the second and third floors and spread quickly through the nine-unit structure.
A 20-year-old man in the apartment opened the front door to the apartment, and fire burst into the unit, according to law-enforcement sources. He ran back into the apartment and tried to climb out a window, then fell to the ground.
He was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was in stable condition and being treated for a fractured pelvis and wrist, police said Saturday. A hospital spokesman would not release his condition Sunday.
According to David Tyrawa, a friend in Belvidere, the injured man had spent much of Saturday in surgery to help mend his pelvis and was told by the man’s parents that he would was set to undergo additional surgery within the next few days.
Carlson’s body was found in the north bedroom, sources said, while the body of one male victim was found in the living room and two others were found in another bedroom. Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said there were multiple smoke detectors in the building, some of which were working, while others were not. It was unclear how many smoke or carbon-monoxide detectors were in the apartment or whether they were working, he said.
Several samples of debris from the scene were sent to a state crime laboratory, and the state fire marshal’s office and the police bomb and arson section were both conducting investigations, officials said. A police source close to the investigation said Saturday that a fire dog with the fire marshal’s office found an area where an accelerant may have been used, but Bond could not confirm that.
In Belvidere on Sunday, the mothers of two of the victims declined to speak at length with reporters, both saying their sons had not been officially pronounced dead by the medical examiner’s office.
Bowers’ family gathered at his mother’s home and tried to make sense of his death.
He graduated in 2005 from Southern Illinois University with a degree in business administration. After a stint doing construction work after college, he found a job at a Chicago bank about a year ago and had recently been promoted, his brother said.
“He was just getting his life together and knew what he wanted to do,” said his half-brother Joe Zobal. “He wanted to be in the city with the hustle and bustle.”
Although he was making new friends in the city, his mother, Kathleen, said he stayed in close touch with his friends from home.
“They would just come to visit” him in Chicago, she said. “They do that a lot–back and forth, here and there. They’ll just go kick up their heels and go run around Chicago.”
Bowers ran track in high school and was on a YMCA swim team when he was younger. He enjoyed the outdoors and loved water sports. He also liked to rock-climb and had been on whitewater rafting trips, his family said.
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His father, John Harold Bowers, who was in the Army, died of a brain tumor in 1987. The family had lived in North Carolina and Louisiana and was stationed in Germany when he died. Kathleen Bowers moved to Belvidere to be near her husband’s family. Her son Greg Zobal died in a truck accident about five years ago.
“My kids aren’t supposed to go before me,” Kathleen Bowers said, shaking her head slowly at the latest loss.
Friends and family said the lease on the Wrigleyville apartment was set to expire in about a month, and Carlson and Bowers planned to part ways.
He was searching for a new place in the city with another friend; she was set to return to Belvidere soon with her son, Blake, 4, who was staying with a baby-sitter in Itasca the morning of the fire because his mother had to work a late shift the night before.
Carlson was the youngest of three children and dropped out of Belvidere High School in 2000 during her senior year, though she earned a GED later that year, said her aunt Cheryl Greenlee.
She moved to Chicago two years ago to attend college, her aunt said, and though she loved the city, she was also happy to come back home.
“She was moving back home to start her career,” Greenlee said.
On Saturday, family members had feared that Carlson’s son had also died in the fire but rejoiced when the baby-sitter brought the boy to the scene that afternoon. A day later, they wondered whether he could understand what happened.
“We just answer his questions specifically and don’t give any more details,” Greenlee said. “We let him talk when he wants to talk and let him play when he wants to play.”
On an already trying day, she said, family members went to the medical examiner’s office Sunday to identify Carlson’s body. They needed only to see the tattoo of the Celtic cross on her back to know it was her.
“It’s been a difficult day today,” her aunt said.
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