After Arson Kills 3 Relatives, Queens Family Holds Onto A Miracle

EAST ELMHURST, QUEENS — The day before Rafelina Moreno’s 49th birthday, on July 10, she got a phone call from an unknown number.

The caller left Moreno a 32-second voicemail with no message, just the faint sound of sirens and what was either the heavy breathing of the man calling — a man who soon would be inextricably tied to her fate — or the rustle of the wind.

An hour and a half later, Moreno’s East Elmhurst home started burning.

Moreno’s downstairs neighbor called 911. She didn’t speak much English, according to Moreno, so when firefighters arrived four minutes later, she just pointed to the second-floor window.

The firefighters figured it was a false alarm, they later told Moreno. They didn’t see any flames shooting out.

Just to make sure, they opened the front door.

The fire they found would devastate a family, killing three of its members and a mysterious visitor who authorities say started it all. The family’s plight would be splashed across newspapers and tabloids — but their story has never been fully told, until now.

David Abreu Nuñez needed a job. Back home in Santiago de los Caballeros, the second-largest city in the Dominican Republic, he’d worked with a friend decorating parties, from birthdays to baptisms. Everybody knew each other, it felt like, and everybody helped one another. New York City wasn’t like that.

Through the friend, he found Rafelina Moreno. She had left Santiago for the United States in 1994 and now made her living putting together extravagant banquets at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan – union work. In June 2019, he sent her a Facebook message from a profile bearing their mutual friend’s name.

“Can you get me a job?” he asked. “I’m a decorator.”

“Oh, you’re here?” Moreno wrote back, mistaking Nuñez for their mutual friend.

“No, I’m his friend.” Nuñez replied.

Moreno had never met Nuñez, but their mutual friend in Santiago, whose family had kicked him out for being gay, had taken care of her mother before her death. Moreno told Nuñez she couldn’t hire him — she didn’t have that authority — but gave him a number he could call to reach the union.

He never called.

On July 6, Nuñez called the police from his apartment on Morris Avenue in The Bronx, according to court records obtained by Patch. He said he was at home when he heard a knock. When he opened his front door, four masked men barged into the apartment, mentioned the name of his ex-boyfriend and demanded money. They pushed Nuñez against a wall and he fainted.

When he regained consciousness, his hands and legs were tied and he’d been sexually assaulted, he claimed.

But the first responders who showed up saw no evidence of injuries matching Nuñez’s account. They brought him, tied to a stretcher, to St. Barnabas Hospital for an evaluation, according to building surveillance footage obtained by the New York Post.

Nuñez later admitted to the police that he’d made the whole thing up to frame his ex-boyfriend, who he claimed had mistreated him back home in the Dominican Republic. He had come up with the plan three days earlier and had enlisted the help of two friends to put it into action, he said.

“I was feeling depressed. It was all false. I told the police and the hospital false information,” Nuñez told police, records show. “Nobody came to my house. Nobody assaulted me. I did it to myself.”

On July 7, the NYPD arrested Nuñez on a misdemeanor charge of falsely reporting an incident, according to the records obtained by Patch.

“Even in scary movies, you don’t see that kind of mentality,” Moreno later said in an interview with Patch.

After the stunt, Nuñez’s roommate in The Bronx kicked him out, the roommate told the New York Post in an anonymous interview.

The next day, Nuñez called Moreno asking for help, claiming that someone had tried to kill him and he’d just gotten out of the hospital. He had gotten her phone number from a relative in the Dominican Republic, she later found out.

Nuñez recounted the story of the assault but didn’t mention the arrest. All he had to his name was $688 in cash, according to his hospital property voucher, which Patch reviewed.

Moreno said she wasn’t sure why Nuñez called her, of all people. But he said he had no family in New York, so she offered to help him find a place to stay.

“It’s just the way we were brought up,” Moreno said. “If you can, you help others.”

For two nights, Nuñez slept on the family’s living room couch. Moreno had tried to help Nuñez get a hotel room, but he had no form of ID.

The East Elmhurst home, which Moreno owned with her husband, was brimming with guests: Moreno’s sister, Elizabeth, was visiting from the Dominican Republic with her young children, Ema and Liam. The sisters’ father, 76-year-old Claudio Rodriguez, was there too, so Elizabeth didn’t have to travel alone with the two babies.

Moreno had started to feel that something was off with Nuñez’s story. He was walking normally, she noticed, even though he’d just suffered a brutal assault. Her sons had thought something amiss, too, they later told The New York Times. The family started asking around about him.

“I told my mom, ‘Mami, there’s something weird here,'” one of her sons, Anthony, told the newspaper.

The morning of July 10, the family told Nuñez to leave. A well-connected neighbor had sent the Morenos information about Nuñez’s arrest and it spooked them. Nuñez asked if he could come back later to pick up the few belongings he had and the family agreed. Moreno headed to work, and Nuñez walked out the door.

Several hours later, Nuñez returned to the Morenos’ home for the last time. He was carrying a canister of gasoline.

When the firefighters of FDNY Engine 316 broke down the front door at 23-49 93rd St., they saw Elizabeth on the ground, curled around her baby boy, Liam, in a home filled with fire. Firefighters gave the baby CPR, wrapped him in a blanket and rushed him and his mother to an ambulance.

“He started screaming right away when we administered the CPR,” firefighter Steve Keenan, who rescued baby Liam, told the New York Daily News in August. “That was a good sign.”

The firefighters made it through the kitchen to a set of stairs, where they found 6-year-old Ema, still breathing. In an upstairs bedroom, they came across Nuñez and Claudio locked in combat.

Authorities would later find traces of Nuñez’s skin under Claudio’s fingernails — a tell-tale sign of a fight, they told the family.

Outside the bedroom, a ladder had been perched against the window, primed for escape.

It took more than 100 firefighters to battle the blaze, according to a spokesperson for the Fire Department.

“It’s quite unusual at that time in the afternoon to have a fire trap five occupants in a private dwelling,” FDNY Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro said the day of the fire.

The Fire Department declined multiple requests for an interview with the captain of FDNY Engine 316, one of the first responders. He and four other firefighters who responded to the blaze, as well as a police detective assigned to investigate the case, described the order of events to family members, who recounted them to Patch for this story.

Moreno was at work when her youngest son called with the news. “Be ready, don’t go crazy,” he said.

Claudio and Ema were dead. Moreno’s sister, Elizabeth, and nephew, 10-month-old Liam, were in the hospital in critical condition. Ninety percent of Elizabeth’s body was covered with severe burns. Baby Liam’s little body was 95 percent burned.

Ema’s body was so badly burned that authorities wouldn’t let the family see her: “You don’t want to remember that little girl like that,” a police detective told them, as one family member recalled.

Officials tasked with investigating the fire told the family they suspected Nuñez was to blame, but he, too, had been killed. Moreno was the one to identify his body.

Several days after the fire, Nuñez’s father, Fabio Abreu, told a Dominican newspaper that he believes his son’s abusive ex-boyfriend was responsible but cited no evidence.

“I know my son very well and I do not think he was the one who committed the fire,” Abreu said. “They should find out more.”

A Fire Department spokesperson unambiguously rejected that claim. He said the fire marshals’ investigation had found that Nuñez started the fire, citing witnesses and unspecified forensic evidence.

Two weeks after the fire, baby Liam was flown to Galveston, Texas.

Doctors at Weill Cornell Hospital’s burn unit, one of the largest in the country, had been working around the clock to keep Elizabeth and Liam alive, but they admitted there was little more they could do to help the child.

“The doctor was like, ‘Can I be completely honest?'” Moreno’s sister-in-law, Denise, recalled. “He said, ‘We didn’t think he was going to survive.'”

So Liam’s hospital bed was rolled into a tiny plane bound for Shriners Hospitals for Children – Galveston, which has built a reputation for specialized burn care for children. Two medical workers and Moreno’s oldest son, Devin, went with him, though there was barely enough room in the plane for them with all the medical equipment Liam needed to make it through the flight.

He was just shy of his first birthday.

Liam had been baptized bedside at Weill Cornell, and Denise was named his godmother. Becoming Liam’s titi nina, she said she developed an instant bond with the child. She wanted to do whatever she could to help.

“We’re hoping for a miracle,” she told Patch in July. “We’re praying.”

Denise took charge of efforts to raise money for Liam and Elizabeth’s care. A GoFundMe page she started the day after the fire collected nearly $20,000. A separate fundraiser brought in more than $10,000 for Liam’s medical costs and his transportation to Texas.

Liam was starting to recover, against all odds. But his mother, now more than a thousand miles away, was slipping away.

Moreno was back home in the Dominican Republic to bury Ema and her father when she got a text from her sister-in-law, Denise, who was with Elizabeth at the hospital: “Rafi, you have to be here.”

She changed her flights and rushed to her sister’s side. The morning of Aug. 6, about two weeks after Liam left for Texas, Elizabeth died. Nearly a month had passed since the fire.

The machines that filled her hospital room started beeping, just like in the movies, Moreno recalled. She thought she was going to lose her mind.

“When I walked through the hallway, I didn’t see any people,” Moreno said. “I was blind. It was full of people.”

Elizabeth didn’t have any form of ID, so Moreno identified her body to medical examiners by the gap between her front teeth.

“Sometimes you wake up and you just try to ask yourself if it’s a bad dream,” Moreno’s husband, Raul, told the New York Daily News at Elizabeth’s funeral. “There are good days, bad days.”

One of the good days was Saturday, Aug. 10, when the family came face-to-face for the first time with the five first responders who battled the blaze. Firefighter Steve Keenan, who saved baby Liam from the flames, got to see him in a FaceTime video call for the first time since his rescue mission.

“I call them my fab five now,” Liam’s godmother, Denise, said. “It’s like they’re our little family.”

On Aug. 15, another good day, Liam celebrated his first birthday. The Morenos had filed papers to adopt him. Liam el león, little fighter, 1-year-old warrior, the family calls him. Miracle baby.

The Morenos’ miracle baby has made it through 17 surgeries and a bout of pneumonia in the months since the fire.

Liam’s doctors in Texas amputated his left pointer finger and thumb, the toes on his right foot and his entire left foot, which they replaced with a prosthetic. He has gotten skin grafts on his chest, face, skull, back, butt and legs. In October, doctors stood him up on his prosthetic foot for the first time. He can now sit upright, and he can last more than three hours without a ventilator.

Ask him for un beso, and Liam will purse his lips and blow a kiss.

“He speaks through his eyes,” his godmother, Denise, said.

Rafelina and Raul Moreno’s new home is steps from the stretch of Astoria Boulevard where planes fly so low they seem to brush the roofs of the houses. The beige carpet is immaculate. The white walls are bare.

Click Here: liverpool mens jersey

A Christmas tree glows in a corner of the living room, alongside a poster board with a photo of Elizabeth that the family made for her funeral in the Dominican Republic.

Theoretically, it’s all temporary. The family will move back into their home on 93rd Street, reborn from the ashes, made whole again. But construction crews still haven’t touched it.

Moreno isn’t sure they’ll ever return. When Liam gets out of the hospital — it could be as soon as August, they’ve been told — will he be able to climb the stairs, she wonders? What accommodations will he need?