Surveillance video showed the horrific attack Saturday on a 73-year-old who was doused in lighter fluid and burned alive. A man surrendering to police says she owed him $2,000.
NEW YORK As Deloris Gillespie went up the elevator to her fifth-floor Brooklyn apartment, her killer was waiting.
Surveillance video from inside the small elevator shows that he looked something like an exterminator, with a canister sprayer, white gloves and a dust mask perched atop his head like a pair of sunglasses. The sprayer was full of flammable liquid.
When the elevator opened Saturday afternoon, the man sprayed the 73-year-old woman, who crouched to the floor to try to protect herself, New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne said. The attacker sprayed Gillespie in the face and continued to spray her "sort of methodically" over her head and parts of her body as her bags of groceries draped off her arms, Browne said.
Then, Browne said, the attacker pulled out a barbecue-style lighter and ignited a rag in a bottle. He waited a few seconds, then backed out of the elevator and tossed in the flaming bottle.
Neighbors in the Prospect Height building quickly reported a fire, but had no idea that a person was burning alive.
Overnight, a 47-year-old man stinking of gasoline went into a police station and implicated himself in Gillespie's death, Browne said. The suspect, Jerome Isaac, told police he set her on fire because she owed him $2,000 for some work he had done for her, Browne said.
Jaime Holguin, who lives on the same floor as Gillespie, saw surveillance pictures of the attacker and said, "Oh, my God!"
Holguin, manager of news development for the Associated Press, said the attacker looked like a man who lived with Gillespie for about six months last year and appeared to have been helping her out.
That arrangement apparently ended by early 2011, but months later Holguin started seeing the man nearby on the street, looking "a lot more disheveled."
Browne said that after setting Gillespie ablaze, Isaac set another fire at his own apartment building nearby, then hid on a roof before turning himself in to police.
Isaac was arrested Sunday on murder and arson charges.