Colorado’s second-highest court has weighed in for the first time on whether it is arson to light fire to a person’s clothes while they are wearing them – and the answer is yes.

John Anthony Vasquez is serving a lifetime sentence after a jury found him guilty of murder for setting fire to Christina Archuleta-Blasier at a campsite in Clear Creek County, rejecting Vasquez’s claim the fire was an accident. Vasquez appealed his convictions for arson and murder, arguing arson is a crime against property, not against a person.

Vasquez pointed to the wording of Colorado law, which provides that a person commits arson by starting a fire “on his own property or that of another” and places anyone else in danger of death or serious injury. All parties to the case, including the prosecution and the trial judge, believed the question was whether Archuleta-Blasier’s clothes counted as “property.”

“Every instance of fire-related death where the victim is clothed would constitute felony murder predicated on arson. But if the same victim was not clothed during the fatal fire, then the same defendant would not be guilty,” public defender Kamela Maktabi argued to the Court of Appeals on behalf of Vasquez.

But the three-judge appellate panel reviewing Vasquez’s case disagreed with everyone that “property” referred to the victim’s clothes. Instead, it meant the geographic location of the fire – in this case, a campsite. 

“To put it another way,” wrote Judge Steve Bernard in the Sept. 8 opinion, “fourth degree arson criminalizes knowingly or recklessly starting or maintaining a fire on property situated anywhere in Colorado, and by doing so endangering a person, a building, or an occupied structure.”

Because the prosecution presented evidence that Vasquez had started a fire on property in Colorado and placed Archuleta-Blasier in danger of death or serious bodily injury, the panel upheld Vasquez’s arson conviction.

Vasquez separately contended it was not possible for the jury to convict him of second-degree murder as well as felony murder, which involves the death of a person during the commission of another crime, including arson. If Vasquez set Achuleta-Blasier on fire, he argued, that was simply murder, and not arson resulting in murder.

The Court of Appeals disagreed, explaining the legislature had specifically included arson as one of the offenses that can trigger a felony murder charge. The appellate judges conceded that Vasquez’s two murder convictions, however, should merge together into the felony murder offense only.

Achuleta-Blasier died on July 20, 2016, with burns on 60% of her body. She and Vasquez had taken a camping trip with her two young sons the previous month. The two adults began arguing and Archuleta-Blasier reportedly smashed a beer bottle from which Vasquez had been drinking. Vasquez then picked up a canister of gasoline, poured it on Archuleta-Blasier, and lit her clothing on fire with his lighter.

Reportedly, police never questioned her about her injuries before her death.

Authorities first arrested Vasquez for drinking alcohol, which violated a condition of his protection order, and added several more charges related to Archuleta-Blasier’s killing. Vasquez stated Archuleta-Blasier sustained burns when she tried to start a fire. At trial, some experts testified the fire appeared set intentionally, while the defense’s expert believed an insufficient investigation made the exact nature of the fire unknown.

The Court of Appeals panel did agree with Vasquez that some of the prosecutor’s comments at trial were improper. During closing arguments, the prosecutor began to tell a story about his own childhood experience playing with matches in a shed, which the panel deemed unrelated to the evidence.

The prosecutor also told the jury that the trial was a “public reckoning” and jurors were “the conscience of our community.” Vasquez claimed the statements improperly appealed to the passions of the jury.

“We agree that the prosecutor went too far with those comments,” wrote Bernard, a retired judge who sat on the panel at the chief justice’s assignment. “Still, the comments played a small role in the argument as a whole, and given the strong evidence of defendant’s guilt, we cannot say there is a reasonable probability that they contributed to his conviction.”

The case is People v. Vasquez.