A Bronx Neighborhood Loses Its ‘Monarch’ to Arson

On Tuesday, the 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.