At 4:05 p.m. on Monday, an apparently homeless couple set fire to a couch 17th and Treat streets, reportedly as a result of a lover’s spat, damaging a nearby car and the exterior wall of University Games, a board game maker on the block.
“They were fighting out there all day,” said Chris Lehman, the co-founder and CFO of University Games, who said heat from the fire broke five or six windows but that nothing inside was damaged. “They were mad at the world,” he speculated.
Lehman said the couple had “just moved there the day before” and had “a ton of gear” blocking the sidewalk. The police had been called at 10 a.m. earlier that day, he said, because the couple had been fighting since the morning, but they had left them alone and the altercation died down by 1 p.m.
A formerly homeless man who didn’t wish to be named said he knew the couple, who regularly get into arguments and “destroy each other’s stuff.”
“It was probably a love spat,” he said. “A little tit-for-tat kind of thing that never really ends.”
A construction worker in the area said that he saw one homeless man try to put out the fire with a hand-held extinguisher and that “the powder was everywhere” but the fire was not successfully extinguished. It’s unknown if this was a member of the couple.
Lehman said he had no video of the incident, and the police said a suspect fled the scene on a bicycle, northbound on 16th Street. There have been no arrests made.
