Ghost Ship leader: ‘I am incredibly sorry’

Video: Warehouse leader on Today show (Dec 6)

He sighed, struggling near tears. He waxed poetic about his flesh being torn, and of the high calling of art. He lashed out and stormed off.

In his first extensive interview since Friday’s inferno at the converted warehouse he ran in Oakland, the leader of the Ghost Ship artists collective said Tuesday that he was “incredibly sorry.” But he rejected the idea that he is responsible for the deaths of the 36 people who perished in the flames during an electronic music show — and when he was pressed, the whole interview went off the rails.

“Should I be accountable? I can barely stand here right now,” Derick Ion Almena told interviewers on the NBC “Today” show as he stood outside the disaster scene sporting a fedora.

“I’m only here to say one thing,” Almena said, “that I am incredibly sorry, and that everything I did was to make this a stronger and more beautiful community, and to bring people together.”

This still frame from exclusive video provided by San Francisco TV station KGO-TV, made late Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, shows Derick Ion Almena, front, and Micah Allison, partly hidden behind him, the couple who operated the Ghost Ship warehouse where dozens have died in a fire, at the Oakland, Calif., Marriott Hotel. When a KGO reporter asked if he had anything to say to the families of those who were killed, Almena said: "They're my children. They're my friends, they're my family, they're my loves, they're my future. What else do I have to say?" (KGO-TV via AP) less This still frame from exclusive video provided by San Francisco TV station KGO-TV, made late Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, shows Derick Ion Almena, front, and Micah Allison, partly hidden behind him, the couple who ... more Photo: Associated Press Photo: Associated Press Image 1 of / 94 Caption Close Ghost Ship leader: ‘I am incredibly sorry’ 1 / 94 Back to Gallery

Almena, 47, avoided the public after the blaze broke out shortly before 11:30 p.m. Friday, and had been sighted only sporadically until he showed up Tuesday in front of the ruins at the corner of 31st Avenue and International Boulevard.

He was the leaseholder for the hulking warehouse, running it as a quasi-commune of artists called the Satya Yuga. And as details of his clashes with the law spilled out — a case involving a stolen trailer, his children briefly taken away by authorities, code violations — many have vented anger at him on social media.

Behind Almena, emergency workers picked through the rubble for more remains. The death toll of 36 makes the Ghost Ship fire the deadliest structure blaze in California since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire — and authorities were looking at an area with appliances as a possible source of ignition.

During his emotional six-minute interview with “Today,” Almena sighed heavily, defended his Ghost Ship as a noble “dream,” and angrily yelled at the show’s hosts, Matt Lauer and Tamron Hall, when they grilled him on the accusation that he made a profit off poor artists who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. Current and former residents have said they paid anywhere from $500 to $1,500 a month to live in the building, which city officials say did not have permits as a residential or entertainment space.

“I laid my body down there every night,” Almena said. “We put our children to bed there every night. We made music, we created art. It didn’t start out as our home. It started off as an initial dream, an idea that we would have a facility and a venue that would host everything from at-risk youth to the gay community to artists that couldn’t perform anywhere.”

He added, “Profit? This is not profit. This is loss. This is a mass grave.”

Almena said that three years ago he signed a lease, “and I got a building that was to city standards, supposedly. ... I’m the father of this space.”

Efforts to contact the owner of the building, Chor Ng, have been unsuccessful. Her daughter has told reporters that Ng did not know people were living in the building.

“I’m an honorable man, I’m a proud man,” Almena told the “Today” hosts, who were in their New York studio. Then, when asked if he was worried he’d be criminally charged in the case, he snapped.

“I’d rather get on the floor and be trampled by the parents — I’d rather let them tear at my flesh — than answer these ridiculous questions,” Almena said. “I’m so sorry. I’m incredibly sorry.”

When he added, “I’m not going to answer these questions,” Lauer cut in and declared the interview over. Almena then left the scene as other reporters tried to question him.

In an earlier quick interview with the TV network, Almena’s wife, Micah Allison, said the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is investigating the fire, had “interviewed Derick extensively.”

“We have not been in any way hiding from this,” Allison said.

Reactions to the interviews were swift and scornful on social media and in person from many who know Almena or have been following the tragedy.

“That’s exactly a good example of who he is,” said Shelley Mack, 58, who lived in the Ghost Ship from October 2014 to February 2015 and said she had frequent conflicts with the de facto landlord. “He’s a whore for attention. He just couldn’t resist doing an interview. And then he got mad because they were asking him direct questions — that’s what happens.”

She said Almena had run a hostile environment full of jury-rigged creations ripe for fire, but enticed artists and others to live there because rent was cheap and they didn’t have much money.

“That’s why people were there. It was a horror house. A death trap. He was terrible,” Mack said.

Some who lived in the warehouse have said it was illegally tapping into power sources of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., but the company said Tuesday that it had no knowledge of that.

Bad wiring has been viewed all along as a possible cause of the blaze, given the building’s hodgepodge of makeshift hookups and exposed wires. On Tuesday, authorities told The Chronicle that the fire may have started in an area with several appliances.

Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern said emergency workers have been extra careful about removing debris from a rear part of the converted warehouse where there are telltale signs of extreme heat, so as not to disturb what could be evidence for determining the source of the ignition.

“On that back wall, there was a 45-degree-angle burn, and they need to look at that area very carefully,” Ahern said. “And in that area is a toaster, a small refrigerator and slightly larger refrigerator, small and about four feet high, like one from the 1950s. We’re not saying a refrigerator is the cause, we’re just saying that’s the area where the ATF is looking.”

Jill Snyder, special agent in charge of the ATF’s San Francisco bureau, said she had brought in an electrical engineer to help in the probe and that her agents were looking at “anything electrical.” The rear area seems like the most likely source of ignition, she said, based on what firefighters saw when they fought the blaze, what witnesses said, and what the “fire science” of the probe is indicating.

However, she added, “we do not have a cause determined right now.”

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley is also investigating the fire, and though she did not name the targets of the probe, she said charges could range up to murder.

Meanwhile, city firefighters and county sheriff’s deputies said Tuesday that they have combed through 90 percent of the 160-by-48-foot building and don’t expect to recover more victims. They hoped to have the structure completely searched by Wednesday.

“Based on the areas that remain unsearched, I don’t anticipate it going up,” Battalion Chief Robert Lipp of the Oakland Fire Department said of the death toll.

The City Council is expected on Thursday to declare a state of emergency in Oakland, aimed at making its government and residents eligible for state and federal relief funds.

Officials said 35 of the victims have been identified, 30 of their families have been notified, and five more families were in the process of being notified. One person remains unidentified, they said.

Rain that is expected to roll in Wednesday night and pick up by the end of the week will not change the rate at which firefighters and deputies work their way through the rubble, said Oakland Fire Department Battalion Chief Melinda Drayton. “We’re going to be just as comprehensive, just as methodical, just as analytical to make sure we’re successful in a full recovery,” she said.

For the past two days, family and friends of the victims have been visiting the fire scene in Oakland — but quietly, out of the limelight, and it has meant a lot to them, said Sgt. Ray Kelly, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.

“Put yourself in their shoes: You’re hearing about what happened, they’re not as tuned in as the rest of the people watching the news in the morning,” Kelly said. “Their lives have been completely altered. They’re not watching television, they don’t know what the broader public knows. So they have pictures and images in their minds of what they think this place may look like, what may have happened.

“When they get here they’re like, ‘OK, I see it, I get it, I'm starting to wrap my mind around what this building looks like.’”

The reactions have varied from silence to weeping to fascination with the building, Kelly said. “It runs the gamut.”

Some of the victims, he said, sent texts to their parents as the flames closed in, saying they loved them and that they were about to die.

Memorials have spread around the area near the warehouse, with dozens of candles, bouquets and handwritten signs. “Never forget ghost ship,” said one. Another read, “Party on for us friends, we’ll see you shortly.”

Many small pieces of purple paper with victims’ names were tied with ribbon to a fence.

Guillermo Lesh, a 49-year-old painter who once lived in the neighborhood, came to the memorial Tuesday to pay his respects.

“It hits hard,” he said. “It's very disturbing. It's unreal.”

Chronicle staff writers

Kimberly Veklerov and Vivian Ho

contributed to this report.

Kevin Fagan and Hamed Aleaziz are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com, haleaziz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron @Haleaziz