A Long Island dad made an eerie Facebook posting in December with photos of fuel cans and the words, “If you’re going to go out with a bang, do it right.”
On Tuesday, he apparently followed through in spectacular fashion.
The garage of Mike MacNeill’s home on Prospect Avenue in Port Washington exploded at about 9 p.m., just seconds after cops arrived in response to a 911 call of a domestic disturbance and were walking down the driveway with MacNeill’s wife and 2-year-old daughter.
The couple was in the midst of a divorce, according to TV station CBS 2 New York.
The 911 call had been placed from inside the home and when police got there, 39-year-old Angela MacNeill and her daughter said they smelled a strong gasoline odor.
The ensuing explosion set the two-story house ablaze as well as two neighboring homes — and the blast shook restaurants more than a mile away.
“We heard the blast,” said neighbor Lynda McDougald. “It shook our apartment. We were rocked out of our beds.”
Residents of Prospect Avenue screamed to their neighbors to flee and seek safety. “It was a raging wall of fire,” said Richard Baiocco, who lives nearby. “It must have been 50 or 60 feet high.”
A body was found amid the debris, and Mike MacNeill, who owns the property that went up in flames, was still “unaccounted for” as of Wednesday afternoon.
The fast-paced blaze and loud explosion led officials to blame a “liquid accelerant” for the blast.
“It looks like there were flammable liquids involved,” Brian Waterson, assistant chief of the Port Washington Fire Department, told The Post.
Last December, Mike MacNeill uploaded a photo of a stockpile of gasoline, which he said he planned to use to grill during the winter months.
“If you’re gonna go out with a bang, might as well do it right with 25 gallons of gas and 40lbs of propane,” he wrote online.
Two similar white propane tanks were found charred on the front lawn Wednesday morning following the fire.
Neighbors said they weren’t well acquainted with the MacNeills, who had moved to the neighborhood just last year and mostly kept to themselves.
“I think he’s a very troubled man,” said Baiocco, who added that he didn’t think MacNeill was the type of guy to give a neighbor some sugar if he needed it.
Dressed in a black and white dress with a black jacket covering her head, Angela MacNeill returned to her charred home Wednesday afternoon to collect some belongings, including a large box of files.
More than 100 firefighters from 17 local departments responded to the blaze, which shut down the block until the fire was contained at about 10:30 p.m., officials said.
Four firefighters and one cop were injured. They are expected to make a full recovery.