SEARCH FOR ANSWERS: Investigators are weighing criminal charges in the Badger sisters’ deaths in the Christmas Day inferno.
Employees of a contractor who sparked a Christmas Day fire that killed his girlfriend’s three children are being grilled over the renovation work done at the house as part of an ongoing criminal probe, The Post has learned.
Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said his investigators have talked to several people involved in the work being done on the $1.7 million Stamford home of Manhattan ad exec Madonna Badger.
Her beau, Michael Borcina, was overseeing the project.
“We’re trying to accelerate this and hopefully have something [to release to the public] within the next week and a half, two weeks,” Conklin told The Post.
Conklin has said criminal charges are being weighed.
The blaze destroyed the Victorian manse and killed Badger’s daughters — Lily, 9, and twins Grace and Sarah, 7 — and their grandparents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson. It broke out after Borcina put still-smoldering embers in a bag near a mudroom or trash area in the house, investigators have said.
Conklin said probers have interviewed and re-interviewed people who worked at the site.
“We’ve got a lot more interviews scheduled,” he said.
The home had no new certificate of occupancy, and its smoke-detector system, installed several months ago, was not hooked up, according to officials.
According to sources, the investigation has been hindered because the home was ordered torn down the day of the fire.
One source said the police were not consulted in the decision to tear down the home. Conklin did not respond to several requests for comment on whether his department knew about the tear-down order in advance.
Stamford building department chief Robert DeMarco said he personally made the call to have Badger’s home demolished just hours after the Dec. 25 blaze for “safety reasons.’
No paperwork was filed regarding the order, he said.
“In a criminal probe of a fire, the burned home would be considered a crime scene,” noted Connecticut criminal lawyer Stephan Seeger, who is not involved in the case. “In tearing [Badger’s] down, they’ve reduced the evidence pool.”
Borcina has hired top criminal defense lawyer Eugene Riccio.
The deaths have been ruled accidental.
Seeger noted that if charges are filed, they could range from criminally negligent homicide to reckless manslaughter.
As a contractor, Borcina would be expected to have better-than-average knowledge of safety and construction, Seeger noted.
“The higher the degree of expectation of knowledge, the greater degree of culpability,” Seeger said.
Borcina’s contractor registration in Connecticut expired in 2000. His home-improvement license in New York expired in June 2010.
Borcina and his company, Tiberias Construction, have faced a slew of lawsuits in both states, records show.
Top intelligence and finance guru Maurice Sonneberg won an $87,000 judgment against Borcina in 2005 after suing him for botched renovations to an apartment on Sonnenberg’s Connecticut property, which dragged on for 17 months.
Borcina was slapped with a negligence suit in 2002 by a Connecticut couple after they learned he had no valid registration and installed a kitchen duct system that wasn’t fire rated, among other things. They won a $15,000 settlement.
In December, 2010, a New York music producer accused Borcina of failing to pay a sub-contractor and keeping nearly half the $60,000 he’d been advanced for work on a Long Island home.
Borcina was also sued in June in Manhattan by a man who’d hired him to renovate his Upper West Side co-op. The suit alleges Borcina didn’t get proper work permits before starting the project, and his shoddy work affected other apartments.