|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Shawn Medeiros was at the Hawthorne Country Club for what he says was another odd job.
The family that owns the property needed some tables and chairs moved from the vacant clubhouse to another venue. Medeiros, a mechanic from New Bedford, says he’s known the family for two years, doing jobs like this for them. On that day, he says he loaded the furniture onto his trailer with help from another friend of the family.
It was May 7, 2023 — the day the country club caught fire.
By the time fire crews got there, the clubhouse was “fully engulfed in flames,” authorities said. It took fire crews two hours to extinguish the blaze. The building was a total loss. Investigators determined the fire was arson, but for almost a year they had nothing more to say about the case.
Then, in March, prosecutors charged Medeiros with setting the fire, a felony that comes with up to a decade of prison time. Authorities have previously declined to answer questions about the evidence that led them to file the charges, and spokespeople for the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story.
At his pretrial hearing last month, Medeiros, 32, sat alone in the back of the courtroom wearing a striped polo shirt. He glanced around as other cases were heard. His lawyer was in another courtroom that day, and Medeiros seemed unsure of what was expected of him — where to stand or sit, what to say, when he could leave. The Superior Court judge rescheduled his hearing to a date in September.
Outside the courtroom, Medeiros answered questions shyly but plainly. He said it’s his first time being charged with a crime (prosecutors did not respond to questions about his criminal history). He lost his job fixing cars at a garage after his boss found out about the charges, he said, and since then he has had to pick up other odd jobs, such as landscaping.
He said he did not start the fire.
“My conscience is clean,” he said.
The country club on Tucker Road in Dartmouth has been vacant since it closed in 2016. Bliss Investors LLC bought it for $2.3 million “and other valuable consideration” in 2021, property records show.
The company’s officers are Stephanie DeMello and Ivonilde Hathaway — family members of Carlos Rafael, the infamous fishing mogul also known as the “Codfather.” Rafael recently pivoted to real estate after a court barred him from the fishing industry. He served almost four years in federal prison for tax evasion, cash smuggling and fraud related to mislabeling fish.
Rafael said there’s “no way” Medeiros was responsible for the fire and there’s no proof.
“I’d bet my life he didn’t burn it,” Rafael said in an interview with The Light in June for a story about his real estate business.
Instead, Rafael suggested that two “kids” on dirtbikes had trespassed on the property the day of the fire and may have started it. The family friend who was with Medeiros to move the tables and chairs chased them off, he said.
“But you know the way the system works,” Rafael said. “They have to get somebody.”
Medeiros said he met Rafael through a Portuguese club two years ago. That’s how he got started doing odd jobs for the family, he said, like boxing up food to send back to the “old country.” He said Rafael told him after the fire that he was innocent.
But Jeff Hathaway, Rafael’s son-in-law, who is also the property’s realtor, said the family doesn’t know Medeiros. He said another person they normally hire to do odd jobs must have brought Medeiros along.
Hathaway said the evidence against Medeiros is circumstantial, but strong.
“I hate to say it: he was the last guy there,” he said.
Hathaway said he first met Medeiros upon arriving at the country club on the day of the fire. He said Medeiros told him he came back to open the gates for the firefighters when he saw the fire trucks coming.
Hathaway wondered, how would Medeiros have known the trucks were headed for the country club? He said police have told the family that Medeiros’s account of what happened that day was “all over the place” and phone records showed he didn’t go where he said he went after the fire.
“Why lie about where you were after the fire? Or why he came back?” Hathaway said.
Hathaway initially offered to arrange a further interview with Rafael specifically for this story, but later backtracked. He said in a text that the family would respond after consulting with their lawyer and with prosecutors, because they didn’t want to “mess up their case.” Rafael, who is currently in the Azores, did not respond to texts or a voicemail message.
The country club is currently under agreement to be sold to Toll Brothers, a luxury real estate developer. The company plans to turn the property into housing for seniors, Hathaway said. The fire has not affected the sale agreement, both sides have said.
New Bedford Light reporter Will Sennott contributed reporting to this story.
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org
This was a fantastic read. Thank you for shedding light on such an important topic with such clarity.
I don’t know what happened, but something is fishy here (no pun intended). It seems like a bad idea to talk to the media as a felony defendant. New Beige is a wonder.
Where else do you get the brilliant phrase “Codfather concurs”?!
I always believe convicted felons.
Trump 2024