User:P-unit/MouseFire

Current as of 11:25 pm, 1/9/05 MST. From article Mouse caused house fire (2006)

On January 8, 2006, it a story started to circulate among news sites throughout the world. The stories claimed that Luciano Mares, then 81, caught a mouse in his Fort Sumner, New Mexico house. After having searched for the mouse for a long time, he felt the need for revenge against the mouse and therefore threw it into a fire in his backyard where he was burning yard waste. Instead of burning, the news stories claimed that the mouse ran as it burned back into the house and ignited Mares's window curtains. The whole home, having been built in the early 1900s, quickly caught fire. The whole house and all of Mares's belongings were lost.

Though this story became widely circulated, Mares later claimed in an interview aired on Albuquerque, New Mexico's ABC affiliate, KOAT 7, that the story was merely a rumor and denied that the mouse caused the fire. Mares claims that the mouse was dead when he put it into the fire and that the winds and dry weather blew the fire into his home.

Mares told KOAT that he had no house insurance and that the home was built by his long passed relative.