Rooming-house tenant allegedly used to tamper with smoke alarms before fatal fire, says witness

Alyshah Hasham

A woman living in an alleged rooming house near Humber College frequently set off the main-floor smoke alarm while cooking, court heard Thursday.

To stop the noise she would try and knock the smoke alarm off the ceiling with a 2-by-4 or a broom handle used “like a baseball bat,” testified Crystal George for the defence.

George, 26, was renting the home’s basement unit with her fiancé at the time of the March 6, 2011 fire that killed one of the upper-floor tenants.

The Crown alleges that the owners of the two-storey home continued to violate the fire code by operating as a rooming house despite clear instructions from a city fire inspector in the months prior to the fire.

Both Jasvir and Sukhwinder Singh face charges of criminal negligence causing death.

The defence has suggested that the three upper-floor tenants were living in the house as a “family” and thus the house was in compliance with the less strict fire code regulations that apply to such units.

It is agreed that the fire began in the room of the deceased tenant, 56-year-old Karnail Singh Dhaliwal, when a hot plate he kept on the floor caught fire.

No batteries were found in the smoke alarms installed on both the first and second floors, according to the report from the office of the Fire Marshal.

On Thursday afternoon, George testified that she told her “really good landlord” Jasvir Singh that one of the upper-floor tenants, Mandeep Sidhu, had repeatedly taken down or hit the main-floor smoke alarm.

Singh and his wife Sukhwinder told Sidhu and the other tenants to stop, she said. While the conversation was in Punjabi, “he pointed at the fire alarm and looked upset,” she told the court.

She also testified that Sidhu would also interfere with the second smoke alarm, installed on the top floor.

“Why does it have to be here, it’s not like anyone smokes,” she said Sidhu told her, adding that she once witnessed Sidhu take down the second-floor smoke alarm and remove the batteries.

Crown prosecutor Paul Zambonini suggested that George disliked Sidhu and was lying about seeing Sandhu tamper with the smoke detectors.

“You are lying, for reasons unknown to me, to help Jasvir Singh,” he told George during cross-examination.

He also suggested that George lied about seeing a letter she told the court Sidhu signed in February. The letter from the Singhs asks the upper-floor tenants to acknowledge with signatures that they are renting the unit as a family and that the tenants are responsible for anyone tampering with the smoke detectors.

“You very well know this is a forgery,” Zambonini told George, suggesting that the letter was produced just before the preliminary hearing.

He noted that she did not mention the letter or Sidhu using a 2-by-4 to hit the smoke alarm during the preliminary hearing.

Source: thestar