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PostWysłany: Czw 11:00, 12 Gru 2013    Temat postu: mall burns after standoff

mall burns after standoff
ROSEVILLE, Calif. highend regional mall that is one of the main retail centers in a broad swath of Northern California was set ablaze Thursday after police arrested a man who had barricaded himself inside.
Police said the man holed up in a video game store at the Roseville Galleria and started a small fire that later erupted and spread to the roof, damaging an entire arm of the mall.
City officials said part of the roof on the mall's south end collapsed. After the clouds of smoke cleared, overhead television images showed the charred remains of retail stores, many of which were gutted. Penney. He said water and smoke damage was extensive beyond that wing.
The Galleria, which is about 17 miles east of the state capital, generates approximately $3.2 million for the city in annual sales tax revenue and could be closed or limited in operations for months.
"This is a real blow. This is sad," Roseville Mayor Gina Garbolino told reporters. when a man claiming to have a gun entered a GameStop store and told employees to get out.
"He was saying stuff about his family. The staff from GameStop was saying he was more or less incoherent," Roseville Police Lt. Mike Doane said.
The employees said the man then barricaded himself in a back room and started a fire. He was hiding outside the store when a SWAT team entered the mall, and he was arrested without further incident. But police later said the fire began spreading as members of the bomb squad were checking the man's backpack to see if it contained explosives, forcing them to flee the building.
Roseville police later identified the man as 23yearold Alexander Corney Pigee, but also said his last name could be spelled Piggee. The man did not have a weapon when arrested,[url=http://www.sport.fr/smartphones/moncler.asp]femmes moncler[/url], Doane said.
A Facebook page by someone of the same name and spelled "Piggee" says he lives in Sacramento and lists his hometown as Stockton.
KCRA3 in Sacramento interviewed the man's mother, who said he had developed mental health problems in the past couple of years and recently was fired from a fastfood burger chain.
The woman, Mary Carter, said she told her son to move out of the family house several months ago because he was old enough to live on his own. Since then, he had been rotating among family members.
"He wasn't a bad kid. I don't know what happened," Carter told KCRA.
The man was taken from the police department to a local hospital. He was released in the evening and booked into Placer County Jail on suspicion of arson.
Mathisen said fire sprinklers seemed to be controlling the flames Thursday evening, but firefighters had not been allowed in.
Firefighting units were called in from surrounding communities to help douse the blaze, which could be seen for miles around the capital region and will have a longlasting effect on the area's economy.
"Especially when they added some of the highend stores, people would travel here just to shop," she said. "They came here instead of San Francisco."
The 240store mall, operated by Westfield Corp., was built in 2000 and includes a Nordstrom. It underwent a $270 million expansion that was completed in 2008, adding Louis Vuitton, Tiffany and Burberry and other highend stores.
Westfield Group spokeswoman Katy Dickey said there are no estimates yet on the cost of the damage. Stores in the most heavily damaged corridor included Finish Line, Anchor Blue and PacSun.

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