Daniel Carnevale, who had been incarcerated since 2006 when he was accused of setting a 1993 fire that killed three people, has always maintained his innocence.
In December, he won a new trial based on new evidence.
But this week, prosecutors with the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office agreed to withdraw the charges against him entirely.
On Wednesday, when Carnevale got called off his pod from the Allegheny County Jail to be released, the officers and other inmates around him gave him a standing ovation.
“He just cried all day that it was finally over,” said Elizabeth Anne DeLosa, managing attorney for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. “He’s excited to rebuild.”
Carnevale, 56, was released Wednesday evening and is staying with his brother, Ms. DeLosa said. He won a new trial in December after the DA’s office consented to it based on “after-discovered evidence.”
That evidence was a report found in a case file showing that one chemist from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives disagreed with another about whether accelerants were found at the scene of the Bloomfield fire.
The blaze at the Columbia House and Regal Apartment buildings, on Jan. 17, 1993, on Taylor Street, killed three residents: Anita Emery, 31, Florence Lyczko, 63, and Chris Stahlman, 22.
Ten days later, ATF investigators, who had been asked to assist, ruled that the fire was incendiary. They cited the nature of the burn pattern; alerts from an arson dog; as well as a five-gallon can of lacquer thinner recovered at the buildings.
Carnevale, who frequented the area, was questioned in the days after the fire and admitted he had stolen checks from residents’ mailboxes there. However, he denied starting the fire.
No arrests were made, and the investigation stalled. But 13 years later, Pittsburgh cold-case detectives found a new witness who came forward.
Carnevale was arrested and then went to trial in August 2007. The case lasted a day-and-a-half, including testimony from a jailhouse informant.
Carnevale was found guilty of three counts of second-degree murder and ordered to serve a prison term of life without parole.
He continued to appeal his conviction for the next 12½ years.
In June 2018, in a petition for post-conviction relief, Ms. DeLosa argued that the ATF experts who testified to it being an incendiary fire failed to follow proper scientific procedures in reaching their conclusions.
One of those experts, Special Agent William Petraitis, who led the investigation and testified at trial, claimed the fire had to be intentionally set because he had eliminated the possibility of it being a natural or accidental cause.
An expert cited by Ms. DeLosa, though, said that using the process of elimination to determine the cause of a fire has been “deemed wholly unreliable,” and is “expressly forbidden” in the field.
Then, in the fall, attorneys found a never-before-disclosed report from one ATF scientist, Julia Dolan, now the ATF Forensic Laboratory Chief, who concluded that the findings by now-deceased ATF scientist William Kinard that lacquer thinner was present, were “meaningless.”
At that point, the DA’s office agreed Carnevale should have a new trial.
Over the past few months, Ms. DeLosa attempted to convince the prosecution of her client’s innocence.
She gave the DA’s office a binder with 1,000 pages of evidence to help make her case.
Then, at the beginning of this week, Ms. DeLosa went to the prosecution with additional new evidence, including previously lost police reports that were recently authenticated by the officers who wrote them. The reports, from the night of the fire, contradicted critical evidence from a witness at the 2007 trial who claimed to have seen Mr. Carnevale leaving the apartment building covered in soot at the time of the fire.
On Monday, the DA’s office filed a petition to withdraw the case against Mr. Carnevale, which was signed the next day by Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning.
Assistant District Attorney Ryan Kiray wrote on the form withdrawing the case: “Due to the age of the case, certain witnesses are unable to be located or are deceased. As a result, the commonwealth is unable to proceed at this time.”
Ms. DeLosa said she appreciated that the prosecution took time to review the entirety of the case.
“I am thankful to the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office for being willing to collaborate with us and be willing to take a fresh look at the facts of the case,” she said.
Paula Reed Ward: pward@post-gazette.com, 412-263-2620 or on Twitter: @PaulaReedWard.
First Published: March 19, 2020, 7:23 p.m.
