Yesterday, The Queens Gazette wrote up the reopening of a hardware store destroyed by a fire on Father’s Day 2001. Three fire fighters were killed and others seriously injured by the fire when gasoline was ignited by a basement pilot light and blew out the store’s facade. It’s undoubtedly a tragic story, but some of the reporting is questionable at best.

It began when two boys, then 13 and 15 years old, sneaked into the store’s back yard on the afternoon of June 17, 2001. After they had tired of other amusements, they decided to try “burning” graffiti-writing whatever they chose to scrawl in gasoline on a given surface and then setting the “writing” on fire so the image burned into the surface. In the melee, a can of gasoline tipped over and spilled. The gasoline flowed through the crack at the bottom of a door giving access to the store basement. The gasoline had partly evaporated and the vapors ignited in the flame of the pilot light of a gas hot water heater.

Does “burning graffiti” into “a given surface” sound too vague and heavy handed. It should. It’s entirely made up. While there is consensus that the boys were looking for spray paint to do graffiti, the only mention of the boys doing anything with gasoline besides accidentally knocking it over, is unsurprisingly, a 2005 editorial in the Queens Gazette.

The fire started when two teenage boys who were burning graffiti into the store’s rear wall accidentally tipped over a gasoline can.

For future reference, it is very suspicious when these silly facts are not reported in the NY Times, NY Post, NY Daily News, or official investigation report for that matter. We’re not accusing the Queens Gazette of fabricating evidence. Wait, yes, we are. Please don’t try to play us like that.