Denver Fire Department
Investigators believe the Denver area’s largest fire in decades was started deliberately, the Denver Fire Department announced on Wednesday, January 14.
Tony Becerra, a 38-year-old Aurora resident, was arrested as part of an arson investigation into the five-alarm fire that injured a firefighter and engulfed an entire city block in flames in early January. Formal charges against him are pending.
Becerra was reportedly identified via surveillance footage, which allegedly showed him entering and leaving the construction site at the intersection of Leetsdale Drive and South Forest Street shortly before the blaze began. Becerra is not homeless, according to the DFD, contrary to social media reports and the initial 911 call.
News of the arrest comes eight days after the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives announced it had deployed its National Response Team to Denver to investigate the fire.
The inferno ignited at around 6:45 p.m. on Friday, January 2, at a construction site for Harker Heights, a 283-unit apartment complex bordering Glendale. The complex was slated to open in May, but the building is now “a complete loss,” according to the DFD. The project was 233,902 square feet and valued at $23.2 million in 2025, the Denver Post reports.
DFD Division Chief Robert Murphy called the blaze “by far” the biggest that the fire department had faced in recent history. It was the first five-alarm fire he had seen in his thirty-year career.
Over 150 firefighters from multiple agencies responded to the scene, in addition to dozens of support staff members and the National Response Team. One firefighter sustained a minor injury, having pulled his shoulder out of place when his hand hit a hose stream. He was treated at the hospital and has since returned home.
In addition to the apartment complex, the flames damaged the exterior of some surrounding houses and construction equipment on the scene, according to the DFD. No other structures burned down.
This isn’t the metro area’s first inferno sparked at a construction site. In 2018, a three-alarm fire at an apartment construction site in North Capitol Hill killed two people. Five years earlier, another three-alarm fire at an apartment construction site in Glendale caused $12 million in damages.
