Father-son duo accused of squatting in NYC storefront set it on fire hours before eviction: feds
A father and son in Queens were charged Thursday by federal authorities with setting fire to a storefront they were accused of squatting in — just hours before an eviction was set to take place.
Narinder Singh, 56, and his 29-year-old son, Jawahar Singh, were allegedly recorded on the store’s security cameras placing paper towels on a hot plate to start the fire on February 18, prosecutors said. Officials only discovered the footage after Jawahar, who is an undocumented immigrant, alerted the FDNY to the store’s video system, the prosecutors added.
The Singhs, who reside in Nassau County, Long Island, had been involved in a long-running and contentious legal dispute with their landlord, who was seeking to remove their print shop from the building.
According to civil court filings cited in the criminal complaint, the landlord claimed the duo were squatters who had signed a fraudulent lease. The conflict escalated on February 17, when a judge denied the Singhs’ emergency request to halt an eviction scheduled for the following day.
Security footage reportedly shows the pair moving a table with a hot plate and paper towels to a section of the store around 8:15 p.m., then plugging the device into an outlet. The father and son left, and roughly four hours later, a paper towel ignited, sparking a fire that destroyed the entire shop just after midnight. “At the scene of the fire, the defendant Jawahar Singh stated to FDNY officers that the Print Shop contained internal video surveillance cameras,” the complaint notes.
When authorities came to search for the Singhs, Jawahar had been “hiding in the crawl space of the house,” prosecutors said during his Manhattan Federal Court arraignment on Thursday.
Both men face charges of malicious use of fire to destroy property used in interstate commerce, filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Prosecutors disclosed that Jawahar is an Indian national who arrived in the U.S. on a tourist visa in October 2018, overstayed, and was previously arrested in 2019. He has an existing order of removal, and an immigration detainer was issued Thursday. Jawahar’s passport is held by his immigration attorney, who is appealing his asylum rejection; he is married to a U.S. citizen.
“The point is, he’s fighting very hard to stay in this country. He doesn’t want to leave it. He doesn’t have the resources to do that. He is a young man; it is simply not plausible that he’s going to spend the rest of his life on the run,” his attorney, Robert Caliendo, told the court, arguing Jawahar was not a flight risk.
Jawahar appeared frail and spoke quietly as family members, including his mother and sister, watched from the courtroom. He was ordered held on a $100,000 bond, with a curfew and a restriction on driving due to a suspended license.
Narinder Singh is scheduled for arraignment on Friday.
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