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Howard Stewart, a New Haven man who was 50 at the time of the fire, was sentenced to 40 years in prison, suspended after 25 years, for setting his girlfriend on fire and pouring an accelerant over her sleeping 12-year-old daughter in a Fair Haven apartment in November 2009. Both survived.

Stewart pleaded nolo contendere. Superior Court Judge Roland Fasano imposed the sentence on Sept. 9, 2011: 20 years to serve for first-degree arson, 20 years suspended after five for first-degree assault, and a concurrent five years for fourth-degree sexual assault, followed by five years of probation. Connecticut Department of Correction records list Stewart as serving a 25-year term at Osborn Correctional Institution.

The fire started around 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 15, 2009, in a three-story, two-family house on Market Street near the corner of Monroe. Assistant Fire Chief Pete Reichard said the couple had argued the night before, Stewart left the house overnight and the fight resumed when he came back. Police said he threw a flammable liquid on the woman, 35, and lit her on fire, then went into a bedroom where her daughter was sleeping and doused the girl as well. The girl woke, saw him working a lighter and ran.

The first-floor tenants had already been woken by the shouting upstairs. The burned woman pounded on their door screaming that he was burning her baby upstairs, the tenant said in an interview at the time. She declined to give her name. The tenant opened the door, found the woman half-clothed and badly burned, and called for help. Police said the girl ran downstairs into a fire that was already spreading, went back up, was pushed into a room and doused a second time, then got out carrying her 3-month-old half sister from a crib.

Thirty-eight firefighters fought the two-alarm blaze, Fire Marshal Joe Cappucci said, and took about an hour to bring it under control. It did significant damage to the second and third floors, and two families needed emergency lodging. The woman was treated for second- and third-degree burns at Bridgeport Hospital's burn unit, where she remained in critical condition the following morning. Senior Assistant State's Attorney Maxine Wilensky later told the court the burns covered as much as 40 percent of her body, that she was placed in induced comas because of the pain and that she still faced two more surgeries. The girl was not burned.

Wilensky said the girl had told her mother that Stewart had abused her, and that the mother then told him he could no longer live in the home. She said Stewart tried to light the girl's bed but could not get a match going, and credited the girl with getting the infant out. "Otherwise, the defendant might be facing a murder charge," Wilensky said. "She trusted him, she loved him. He repaid her by setting her on fire."

Officer Andrew Gambardella found Stewart walking near James Street and Grand Avenue later that day, and he turned himself in. He was charged with arson, assault, criminal mischief and two counts of risk of injury to a minor, and was initially held on a $1 million bond. At sentencing, with scars still visible on her arms, the woman read a statement to the court. "When I look at my burns and marks, I get mad that the person that was supposed to love me was the reason why this happened to me," she said. Stewart apologized and said he changed after he lost his job and his mother died. Fasano cited the "cold-hearted brutality" of the attack and barred Stewart from contact with the woman and her daughters until September 2046.