State’s Attorney Unveils  Story of Nocturnal Rampage

By Wiley Wood

This fire-blackened plaque commemorates the curling club’s founding in 1956. Photo by Beckie Wallace.

The two young men arrested on Mountain Road in the small hours of December 18, 2011, while a fire smoldered on Wheeler Road and another roared at the Norfolk Curling Club on Golf Drive, were sentenced to 10  years in prison for arson and other crimes in Litchfield Superior Court on Dec. 13, 2012.

Kyle Majewski, 20, of Sandisfield, Mass. and Matthew Carey, 20, of Torrington, had previously pleaded guilty to a limited set of charges and faced prison terms of from 7 to 15 years.

At the sentencing hearing, State’s Attorney David Shepack argued that the two acted willfully, knowing that they did wrong and not primarily under the influence of drugs, as they began a rampage that started with bashed mailboxes and stolen street signs and developed into a concerted effort to set the town in an uproar.

Childhood friends, the two nineteen-year-olds met in the afternoon and drove to West Farms Mall in Majewski’s car. Majewski worked as an apprentice mechanic at Alcoa and held down a second job at Infinity Hall for a time, allowing him to buy his Subaru. Carey worked in landscaping but had served a tour of duty in Germany as a private in the National Guard.  In the car was a supply of K2, a synthetic marijuana that has since been banned but was legal in 2011, and a quantity of 4-Loko, a caffeinated alcoholic drink.

Something like a plan seems to have emerged an hour later when the two drove out Mountain Road past the end of the pavement to a low, windowless hut. This was the Aquarion Water Company’s valve station, which controls the flow of water between the reservoir at Wangum Lake and downtown Norfolk. A radio-controlled computer for the facility registered an anomaly at 9:53 p.m. that night. Carey’s boot print was found on the kicked-in door.

Firefighters at the Wheeler Road structure, whose front doors were kicked in by the arsonists. Photo by Jon Barbagallo.

At 11 p.m., , a fire alarm went off in an empty house  on an unpaved stretch of Wheeler Road near the Massachusetts border.  Firefighters found fires in both the main house and the garage apartment,  and the doors and windows to both buildings had been broken. “When [Majewski and Carey] heard the alarm, they fled,” said Shepack. “They knew they had done wrong.”

The two doubled back south on Route 272, crossing at least one of the fire trucks  racing to the scene on Wheeler Road. They drove to the end of Golf Drive, jettisoned the mailboxes and street signs they had picked up earlier, and then turned their attention to the long, metal building nearby. “Having created a diversion at the north end of town and drawn the limited firefighting resources of this small community there,” Shepack told the court, “they flanked behind them and set a second fire at the curling club. Carey acted as lookout, according to his later statement, while Majewski broke into the club and handed objects out to him through a window, including fire extinguishers and curling trophies. It was also Majewski who started the blaze, setting fire to the couch in the locker room. “This was not a disorganized set of actions,” Shepack argued. “It shows planning, intent.”

The wooden portion of the curling club building was in flames by the time firefighters arrived. Photo by Jon Barbagallo.

At 12:45 a.m., the two were trying to break into a rental property on West Side Road through the doors to the basement. A woman in an upstairs apartment heard them and called 911.  According to Shepack, they panicked and fled “at a high rate of speed,” crashed the car once, picked up their damaged bumper from the street, roared off again out Mountain Road, and crashed a second time, rolling the Subaru over the  embankment.

Having hidden most of the remaining evidence of their night’s work in the surrounding woods, Carey used Majewski’s cell-phone to call 911 and report the accident.  Carey explained to the dispatcher that his friend was driving him home when a deer stepped into the road and the car spun out of control.

As would be normal for any car accident with injuries, police and and an ambulance soon arrived on the scene. But it had not been a normal night in Norfolk.  While fire crews from Norfolk and North Canaan were coiling their hoses and repacking their gear on Wheeler Road, reports came in of another fire to “a warehouse-looking building” on Golf Drive.

This video was taken shortly after the firefighters arrived at the curling club at 1 a.m. Blue sparks can be seen arcing from the fire as water is poured onto it.

The North Canaan ladder truck, just passing the Blackberry River Inn on its way home, turned around and reached the Curling Club first. The fire to the wooden part of the building was already fully involved and part of the roof was gone. Blue sparks shot from the wiring, even as the firemen started pumping water onto the rear portions of the building.

“When we heard that there’d been a car accident on Mountain Road,” says Jonathan Barbagallo of the Norfolk Volunteer Fire Department, “our first thought was that it was one of our own, that an emergency worker had crashed on the way to one of the fires.”

An ambulance from Winsted arrived at the scene first. The EMTs examined the two young men, who reported no complaints.  and no pain. They were alert and refused care. Their pupils were normal and reactive. “No one was arrested for operating under the influence,” Shepack pointed out in court.

But the police, when they arrived, quickly realized that the young men’s story was inconsistent and arrested them.  They found pins from the curling club on the car floor and mail from Wheeler Road nearby. Majewski told one of the arresting officers as he drove away in the squad car: “I’m going to be in your head soon, and I’ll be out in a matter of hours.”

Which has now become a matter of 10 years.