The head janitor of a New Jersey elementary school was charged in causing a fire that burned down the school last Saturday after he tossed a lit cigarette in the trash.
Jerome C. Higgins, head custodian at James Monroe Elementary School in Edison, is facing a petty disorderly persons charge for smoking inside the school, violating state law, CBS New York reported. Higgins threw a cigarette that was still lit into his office's garbage can, which then caught on fire and spread throughout the school, the prosecutor's office told CBS News. No one was injured.
Higgins, 48, apologized for setting the school on fire.
"I'm sorry I just can't believe this, my heart goes to the children," Higgins told Pix 11.com "As long as nobody was hurt, that's God's grace."
The charges brought against Higgins are not more severe because, under the law, Higgins' actions do not show intent to burn the school down, Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey said at a community meeting about the fire, CBS News reported.
Administrators said Higgins should have known better.
"I think it was very careless mistake by someone I trusted," said Richard O'Malley, the district's superintendent, according to CBS News.
The school of 500 kindergarten through fifth-graders would have turned 50 this year. Repairs to the school building are expected to take two years. In the meantime, students will be bused to Middlesex County College, O'Malley said.
"It's awful, I don't understand why it happened," Debi Dal Pezzo, who went the school when she was a child, told CBS News. "It's awful."
Though Higgins apologized, some felt the janitor did not express enough remorse.
"The thing that I thought was a little unusual was he was pretty calm," town resident Karen Halo, who saw Higgins in the crowd watching as the school was on fire, told CBS News. "Like if I was the last person in the building and the building was in a fire, I don't know if I would be quite so calm and collected."
