Sharon Horton awoke early last Wednesday morning to the smell of gasoline. When she saw flames rising up the staircase of the house in the Bronx where she rented a room for $25 a week, she did what everyone in the neighborhood did whenever they had a problem.
She called for Ori.
Ori was Oreste De Leon, the 70-year-old owner of the tattered building on Third Avenue in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. He had a reputation for being able to fix anything, including helping out people few others would — drug users like Ms. Horton with nowhere to go. He would let them stay for cheap in the two-story building that had been his childhood home.
Nearly overcome by smoke, Ms. Horton and two of her housemates frantically retreated, breaking windows to escape. She called out for him to flee, but Mr. De Leon did what he always did, she said: He helped someone else, a man she knew only as Chino, who was stuck in the back bedroom.
Both men died in the blaze on May 6. Days after the fire, excavators pulled a third charred body from the ash. The Police Department did not name any of the victims, citing privacy until their families are notified. On a GoFundMe page for funeral expenses, Mr. De Leon was identified by his niece, Salina Rivera. In his part of Mott Haven, everyone knew Ori was gone.
On Tuesday police arrested Daniel Santana, 45, of Unionport in the Bronx, and charged him with arson and three counts of homicide. On May 6, the police said, Mr. Santana came to Ori’s home, which housed a deli on its ground floor. He carried with him a container of accelerant and began to douse the building.
Video surveillance, and Mr. Santana’s own statements, indicate he intentionally caused the fire that killed the three men, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who was not permitted to speak publicly. A motive was still being investigated.
Standing near the ash pit that was once the rooming house where she lived, Mecca Daniels, 51, shook with tears as she remembered Mr. De Leon, who put her up when no one else would. Drugs and alcohol flowed freely there, she and others said, but Mr. De Leon did not judge his tenants’ struggles. “We all looked at each like brothers and sisters, like family,” she said. “And Ori was our pop-pop.”
Almost a week after the fire, Ms. Daniels still wore the hospital bracelets from that night; she had jumped out of a bathroom window onto the neighboring roof, and her hands were covered in scrapes. She and Ms. Horton and another male housemate climbed down to the street using the chain of a roll-down gate, she said, and dropped the last few feet into the arms of a group of Muslim men who happened to be passing by on the way home from morning prayers.
Sandwiched between Tony’s fabric shop and a medical office, the two-story building was built in 1931. The ground floor was most recently home to El South Bronx Deli, with housing on the second story. Mr. De Leon grew up there and was a star baseball player, who liked to tell people he could have gone pro until an injury ended his career. Three generations of De Leons had lived in the home, according to his niece’s GoFundMe page. She did not answer calls. Reached by phone, a sister, Orpha Rivera, declined to comment.
The De Leon family lived upstairs, running different businesses from the ground floor. One iteration, a video arcade that was a hub for local children, neighbors said, launched Mr. De Leon’s neighborhood popularity. As a teenager, Mr. De Leon worked behind the counter of a deli there, Theresa Harrington, 64, said. “He would give all of us credit and keep track in a black book,” she recalled.
But things began to slip for him, Ms. Harrington and others said. He was caught up in the crack epidemic of the 1980s, she said, and for the rest of his life the drug never seemed to let him go. For a time he worked at the Marwa Tire Shop on the corner, according to the owner, but ended up paving his own way as an ad hoc mechanic who made money scrapping discarded appliances he found on the curb; he could fix anything from a carburetor to a washing machine.
In between, he struggled: Police records show convictions for several crimes, including burglary and grand larceny. He had been convicted of possessing drugs more than 20 times.
Still, if you had a problem, you called for Ori, neighbors said.
“He was like the monarch of the neighborhood,” said Malik Dixon, 53, as he gave a shape-up to a client at the Cutting Room barbershop. “If you needed information or needed something fixed, everyone always said, ‘Go get Ori.’”
He stopped midshave and grew emotional. “A lot of kids growing up don’t have their father figure, so when you have people like Ori, you have that father figure when you need some help,” he said. Mr. Dixon said he felt a sense of pride as he grew older, that “I might grow up to be the next Ori.”
As the years passed, Mr. De Leon began to open up his home to a revolving cast of drug users, according to neighbors and the tenants themselves. Ms. Horton, 58, said she met Mr. De Leon on her way to a methadone clinic several years ago; he took her under his wing and taught her how to how to break down discarded air-conditioners for scrap metal.
Ms. Daniels said the atmosphere in the building could be tense, particularly when one or another tenant was on a bender, but life there was underpinned with compassion; if someone was short groceries before their monthly food benefits kicked in, there was always someone who would share. “We looked out for each other,” she said.
Mr. De Leon had made the house above the deli into a home for some of the city’s most marginalized people, but the permissiveness he cultivated, his friends and neighbors said, also sometimes drew dangerous characters. Since January the police have responded to more than 10 calls to 911 for things like disputes and theft at the address.
Mr. Santana is in police custody awaiting arraignment in Bronx Criminal Court, according to the Bronx district attorney’s office.
On Tuesday his apartment door in Unionport was sealed by a police investigation sticker. In the hall, a woman named Ramona Baez identified herself as his wife and said that Mr. Santana had been acting erratically recently. About a week ago, Ms. Baez said, he kicked her out of their apartment. “I was fighting with him and he tossed me out of the house, I’ve been staying in a shelter for the past week,” she said in Spanish, adding that it was “all too much.”
Neighbors in Unionport described a once-friendly man who had worked in construction but recently appeared idle, often found talking to himself or wandering the neighborhood blasting music, apparently intoxicated. He bragged about recently winning a lawsuit, and he began buying expensive clothes and drugs, ranting and sometimes carrying around a bag of cash.
Two weeks ago, he flashed a rifle in the street and threatened to burn a local bodega down, according to a man who said he witnessed the incident and who requested to be anonymous because he was concerned for his safety.
In Mott Haven on the day of his arrest, an asbestos remediation crew worked in the pit where Mr. De Leon’s house had stood. Several of his tenants dropped by to watch the excavators dig through the ash, wondering aloud what would happen to them now.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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