A Queens sicko was arrested Tuesday after he allegedly waltzed into an apartment he had no connection to last month and started a vicious inferno that killed four people, including a 3-year-old girl.
Roman Amatitla, 38, was nabbed by members of the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force at his Queens home on Tuesday for the deadly fire that appeared to be a totally random attack, according to police and sources.
Amatitla has no prior arrests and didn’t appear to know any of the residents — including the four dead and five injured — at the Flushing apartment building he allegedly set aflame on March 16, the sources said.
The alleged firebug lit a piece of wood on fire inside the building and fueled it with an accelerant, sparking a fast-growing blaze that engulfed the complex, the sources added.
It took more than two hours for 74 responding FDNY units to get the inferno under control.
Amatitla was seen on video stealing a can of beer from a store the same day, but it’s not immediately clear if the footage was captured before or after the fire was set, sources said.
It’s also not clear if he stayed at the scene to watch the deadly flames engulf the building or if he fled elsewhere.
Police have not identified a motive.
The relentless blaze tore through the three-story apartment building in the middle of the day.
One horrified resident told The Post that they were “praying so hard that everyone got out safe,” specifically when they watched paramedics wheel out an unconscious victim with wounds they speculated he “can’t have survived.”
“When you see a fire that bad, you know you’re looking at death,” the resident said.
Two of the victims were identified as 3-year-old Sihan Yang and 50-year-old Chengri Cui. The remaining victims, a 61-year-old and a 63-year-old, have not been publicly identified, pending family notification.
Amatitla was slapped with eight counts of murder, 12 counts of assault, eight counts of arson and four counts of petit larceny, according to the NYPD.
The building, which was hardly standing after suffering “heavy, heavy damage” from the blaze, had racked up nearly five dozen violations over the last three decades.
Sixteen violations were still open when the residence burned down. Many were tied to illegal apartment conversions and overcrowding, according to Department of Buildings records.
One violation from a 2020 inspection found that the two-family dwelling had been illegally converted to make room for five single-resident occupancies and nine extra beds, according to a DOB complaint.
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