I’m incredibly sorry.”Īlmena’s ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse was in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, previously infamous as the place where Johannes Mehserle, a white transit officer, shot Oscar Grant, a young black man, on New Year’s Day in 2009. “I’d rather let them tear at my flesh than answer these ridiculous questions. “I’d rather get on the floor and be trampled by the parents,” Almena said. To answer questions about building codes seemed both necessary and ridiculous. Almena allowed many people into his dilapidated house for a party, and thirty-six of them died. NBC News called the interview “rambling,” which it was even more obviously, though, Almena was struggling with the simple weight of what has happened.
“I lay my three children down there every night,” Almena said. He seemed more focussed on the matter of his moral culpability. Almena defended himself on that count, saying that when he’d rented the warehouse it had been legal, though the space had also been much modified since. Almena came into fuller view on Tuesday, when he gave an interview to the “Today” show, in which Matt Lauer pressed him about whether the building had been a safe place to hold a party. The photo gave him a kind of demonic glaze. The photo that first circulated of Derick Almena, the landlord of the Ghost Ship, the Oakland performance space and group house where thirty-six people were killed in a fire, on the night of December 2nd, was a mug shot from a 2015 arrest.