The woman accused of torching her ex-boyfriend shuddered and wept today as she told a Queens jury it was the other way around — that she felt something wet on her back before being enveloped by a “blue flame.”
Agnes Bermudez — accused of killing ex-lover William Salazar in a jealous rage, as well as three upstairs neighbors who died in the 2008 Father’s Day blaze – spoke in a quiet rasp due to her injuries.
She said Salazar woke up up from a drunken snooze early Fathers Day morning to find that people he had invited over had gone home.
He accused Bermudez of driving the out and as the argument escalated told her “’I wish you were dead,’” Bermudez testified.
She said he then threatened her.
“Are you going to kill me,” she recalled asking Salazar. “You’re going crazy. You’re going f—– crazy.”
Prosecutors have claimed that an enraged and jealous Bermudez threw carpet cleaning solution on Salazar and then igniting it.
“Agnes is crazy. She threw that s—- on me and the whole place went on fire,” Salazar told pal Sebastian Castro, according testimony last week.
But Bermudez said yesterday that she turned away from Salazar and heard him say, “You’re going to see how crazy I am!”
She said she felt something wet on her head. Bermudez said that liquid dripped into her eye and, feeling she was in danger, she staggered blindly to the door to get out.
She started to descend the stair case, “Then all of a sudden, POOF! Blue flame. There was blue flame,” Bermudez said.
She dropped her head and wept into her hands as State Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter called for a recess.
A video shown to jurors in court last week show the couple bursting out of the three-story building at 69th Street near Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village and collapsing to the ground.
Bermudez, 50, curls into a ball as flames from her body shoot several feet into the air.
Salazar, although engulfed in fire, somehow manages to run into the Z-Star Deli on the ground floor of his building, desperately seeking help.
Two men inside the deli pour water over Salazar and the still downed Bermudez.
Bermudez woke up briefly while lying on the sidewalk, she said after the break.
“I looked at my arms and they didn’t look the same,” she said. “I thought, ‘My God, what has he done?’”
She said she passed out in the ambulance and when she eventually woke up in the hospital was surprised to hear that Salazar was dead.
“I thought he was in jail,” she said.