MANCHESTER — Two small fires about 30 minutes and 20 feet apart in a Rimmon Street alley last weekend have a landlord and his tenants angry at police who did not show up until the second fire was reported, they say.

“I just got blown off,” said Ray Hubert, 33, of 668 Rimmon St. His mother called the non-emergency police line Saturday night after he put out the first fire in the back of his apartment building.

He had taken his dog out for a quick walk when he saw a line of flames about 4 to 5 feet long and 2 feet high in bushes near a fence. He ran back inside his apartment, grabbed a fire extinguisher and went back out and put out the flames.

When a half-hour passed and no officer arrived on scene, Hubert said he called again, telling the dispatcher police needed to send out an officer to investigate the fire, which he believes was arson.

About an hour later, Hubert said he looked out in the alley and saw a second fire in a mattress about 20 to 30 feet away from where the first fire started. He ran out, pulled a mattress off the building, grabbed a garden hose started spraying it.

This time, 911 was called and both police and the firefighters arrived soon after and finished putting out the fire.

But Hubert believes if police had sent out an officer for the first reported blaze, they could have caught the arsonist.

Police Lt. Maureen Tessier said it is speculative to believe police would have caught someone setting a fire if an officer was dispatched sooner.

She praised Hubert for his quick action, especially moving the mattress away from the garage in the second blaze, and spraying it with a hose until firefighters arrived. His actions, she said, prevented the fire from spreading.

She said, however, Hubert is mistaken about when the fires happened. Telephone logs of the calls to police, she said, record the fires being 32 minutes apart — not an hour — with the first called into police at 11:07 p.m. and the second reported to them by fire officials at 11:39 p.m.

When the first call was received, Hubert had already extinguished the blaze, so the urgency was not immediate, Tessier said in explaining why an officer was not immediately sent out.

She said before the officer could be dispatched, the fire department notified police of the second fire in the same alley. Both police and fire responded.

Investigators termed both fires “suspicious,” but have not yet designated them as arsons, according to Tessier.

Landlord John Tonneson, who owns the Rimmon Street apartment building, is irate that police did not respond to the first call in a timely manner.

“That’s the story and the city is plagued with arsonists,” he said.

Tonneson, who owns four apartment buildings in the city, believes the city is going to end up with only empty buildings and drug dealers if they don’t start solving the arsons.

There was another fire in the same back alley two months ago, he said. A garage was charred in that incident.

Hubert said police ultimately did investigate the fires. He said an officer told him one wasn’t sent sooner because the timing was at shift change.

“I was really upset I got blown off and another fire came after,” he said. “I didn’t care about a shift change. You’re supposed to be protecting us.”

His mother, Lisa Grossardt, 53, was hysterical, he said, and couldn’t sleep afterwards.

The reason Hubert believes the fires were set is because in the first fire, flames were in a line, as if someone poured gasoline or lighter fluid on the ground and lit it.

In the second fire, the mattress had been in the alley for a while and was soaking wet which, he said, means whoever lit it on fire would have had to douse it with an accelerant to get it to light.

One of the police officers, he said, told him investigators believe the arsons are gang-related. “They’re doing them for a gang initiation,” Hubert said.

Tessier said the officer’s report makes no indication of that.

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Pat Grossmith may be reached at pgrossmith@unionleader.com.