— By Eric Francis

White River Junction

Hartford police say that a construction worker has allegedly confessed to investigators that he lit last week’s fire at the River View Motel in White River Junction following a dispute over drugs.

Ethan Lavoie, 30, a resident of Quechee, was brought in front of a video camera at the jail in Springfield on Wednesday afternoon so he could be arraigned before Judge John Treadwell, who conducted the proceeding from a courtroom in downtown White River Junction.

The judge ordered Lavoie held for lack of $10,000 bail after Lavoie entered innocent pleas to felony charges of first-degree arson and burglary, as well as to accompanying misdemeanor charges of petty larceny, careless and negligent operation of a vehicle and leaving the scene of an accident.

The two-alarm fire on May 23 destroyed four of the nine units in the small residential building that for many years was known as the Pleasant View Motel, alongside Route 4 on the edge of White River Junction. The fire displaced 14 residents.

Hartford firefighters were joined by crews from several surrounding towns as they fought the two-alarm fire. Eric Francis photo.

Within minutes of the blaze, which broke out shortly before 6 p.m. that Monday afternoon, Hartford police officers began to suspect the fire had something to do with a drug-related dispute at the motel they had been called to earlier that day involving a tenant and her ex-boyfriend.

Less than three hours after that first call, an individual can be seen driving up to the motel on video clips captured by different security cameras on nearby businesses and the motel itself. Police said that one video shows a 1995 black Ford pickup with a white cap pull up in front of the empty motel room where the driver, wearing a distinctive orange t-shirt, can be seen smoking and then getting out and entering the unit (which was unsecured due to a broken door lock), before emerging a short time later carrying an air-fryer which he places in the back of the pickup before driving off.

“Within a minute smoke is seen billowing out of the room,” Hartford Police Officer Jon Cyran noted in his report on the video, continuing, “A minute later, the truck travels back into the parking lot…the male in the pickup truck gets out of the vehicle and walks over to where the room is on fire (and) appears to attempt to grab for something, at which time he jumps back and shakes his hand indicating it was hot or possibly even burning his hand. (He) then jumps back into the truck and takes off.”

Police allege that during the couple of minutes between the first and second appearance of the pickup truck on the video tape, Lavoie briefly pulled out onto Route 4 and struck an oncoming Honda Civic in a “T-bone collision,” doing substantial damage to the driver’s side of that vehicle, before he turned around and went back into the motel’s small parking lot.

During his brief encounter with the pickup truck, the Civic’s driver did manage to get the license plate on video—and using that and similar video clips, detectives began to zero in on Lavoie as the suspect in the fire, calling him and asking him to come to the police station.

Fire investigators from Hartford and the Vermont State Police examined the arson scene the next morning looking for clues. Eric Francis photo.

In his affidavit, Detective Clifford writes that Lavoie voluntarily came to the Hartford Police Department after getting off work at a nearby highway bridge reconstruction site, initially explaining that he had been driving to get some beer when he spotted a motel on fire and, turning his pickup truck around, got into a collision with a car.

After listening to Lavoie’s account, Clifford told him that he had been seen not once, but twice at the motel that afternoon, including entering the fire apartment moments before the blaze appeared to begin.

“Lavoie then asked when the case ‘would be run by the grand jury and what he would need for bail money’,” the detective wrote.

Lavoie went on to explain that he and his fiancée “have both been having some issues” with drugs and that the ex-boyfriend of the tenant in the room where the fire began had allegedly ripped his fiancée off of $100, but when Lavoie got to the motel he found no one was inside the unit except the tenant’s cat, Mario.

The police affidavit then says that Lavoie used a torch lighter and “ran the lighter around the bed,” quickly discovering it was not a “fire safe mattress.”