Takoma Park activist Walt Rave remembered with fur and population protests

On the 14th of January, a bitterly cold day, area animal rights activists memorialized Takoma activist Walt Rave by first protesting the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control at the Knights of Columbus. then protesting the fur trade at Gartenhaus Furs.

Walt was an in-your face advocate for animal rights and for limiting the total human population on this Earth.

Walt Rave used to protest at area fur retailers carrying a dead fox on unknown origin in a trap on a chain. The fox was salvaged from a part or Walt’s home the fire did not reach-and was brought to Gartenhaus Furs, being displayed outside while their overpriced coats of death were on display inside.

I saw Walt’s reminder of where fur REALLY comes from on display at the Compassion over Killing fur protests from 1997 to about 2002. Many times the Fox put in an appearance at Neiman-Marcus or Miller’s furs! As recently as some of the last few years, he would show up at Fur Free Friday.

Walt Rave died of burns received trying to save his six cats when his house burned down around him on the 7th of December, 2011. The fire was said to have started in his truck, with a dead cold engine shot off for hours and been blown to his house by very high winds that night.

Update of the fire and investigation

At the time of the fire it was thought that all six of Walt’s cats had died with him as he tried to find and save them. I am not aware of any of their bodies being recovered, and now one cat consistent with the description of one of Walt’s cats has reappeared and is being fed as people try to help him/her recover from this trauma and get over any lingering fear of people.

After the Jan 14 protests, I looked at pictures of what the fire did to Walt’s truck that suggested an awfully small fire from the truck to have jumped to the house if all the fire originated under the hood.

The official story is that the fire started “in the engine compartment of the truck” and jumped to the house. The official report makes no attempt it seems to determine just how the engine or engine compartment burst into flames hours after the truck was shut off. Almost everyone around Walt has concluded that the fire was arson, although the photos do suggest that the truck, not the house, was the target of the fire.

It was the truck that regularily bore in-your-face signs such as “Selfish? have more babies!” The fire damage to the truck was consistent with gasoline poured into the heater air intake at the base of the windshield and ignited, with some fire damage under the hood, some on the passenger side dashboard, and about half the paint on the hood and a little on the right side fender burned off. The tire under that fender did NOT burn.

Most automotive heater boxes are plastic, and gasoline poured there and ignited would quickly burn through, in many cars getting access to both the dashboard area and the engine compartment. Once in the engine compartment, many Toyota products have a massive plastic engine cover that could be ignited. A burned up mass of something sits on top the truck’s engine in another photo.

Such a fire would have created a steady flame rising from the base of the windshield so long as any gasoline remained either in the heater box or under it trapped by sheet metal parts of the dashboard or engine compartment. Once the heater box was gone, it would allow flames from other fuels to escape via the windshield base vents, possibly as long as the fire was burning.

My conclusion, based on an examination of the evidence, and my own experience when I used to race cars with engine fires, is that this was a set fire aimed at the truck, fanned into the house by the brutal winds of that night. Every engine fire I ever had or saw in 20 years around hot rodded cars happened with the engine running, starting up, or just shut down. I saw lots and lots of engine fires around auto racing (they are a fact of life in racing!), but never ONE in a car that was cold after sitting for hours and not being started up.

In addition, I have never seen a fire creating damage to parts on top of the engine burn into the heater box and through it past the firewall into the passenger compartment. Even when my own car suffered a massive engine fire fed by a shorted-to-on fuel pump and gallons of fuel, the heater box was not penetrated and no fire came into the car. Even had the large plastic heater box common on newer cars with A/C been installed, little of the fire would have reached it based on damage patterns.

If the fire at Walt Rave’s house was set, and did not originate from an engine long shut off and stone cold, then someone is guilty of felony murder. In the highly unlikely that this was NOT a set fire, Toyota has one hell of a safety issue!