By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

Fire investigators have not pinpointed who set the Garden Motel aflame, and they haven’t given up on finding the perpetrator.

“It’s a lot of door-knocking,” Craig Etherton of the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department said. “It’s part of the process.”

The July fire that razed part of the motel was human-caused, Etherton said. He and fellow fire inspector Bobby Gonder have narrowed down the origin of the blaze, but whether the fire was purposeful or inadvertent is one of the puzzle’s two missing pieces.

Who set the fire is the other.

“We’re pretty confident in what general area it started,” Etherton said. “We’re in a pretty small area.”

The July 14 fire gutted the vacant motel, which, despite a lack of electricity or gas, attracted homeless people and vandals. The county assessed the value of the motel on Northwest Boulevard and West Davidson Avenue for tax purposes at $152,794; the land value is assessed at $394,434, according to the assessor’s office.

The motel closed in 2016 when its owner, Ron Ayers, who bought the property in 2002, aspired to lure a Fairfield Marriott hotel to the location.

Ayers had secured demolition permits for several structures at the motel site and planned to raze the buildings this summer in preparation to build a $14 million, 113-room Marriott Fairfield Inn at the site, as well as a 22 multi-family structure east of the present motel. Ayers said an asbestos evaluation has been completed on the burned structure, and once the results are disclosed, the demolition will proceed.

The Garden was built in the early 1950s at what was then the gateway to Coeur d’Alene. An addition was completed in 1976, Ayers said.

Firefighters responded to a morning fire call at the motel earlier this summer. Roughly 30 firefighters took nearly six hours to knock out the blaze. No one was injured. Etherton said anyone with information about the fire, or video footage should call the department at 208-769-2340.

Part of the investigators’ job is to find and interview suspects along with law enforcement, Etherton said. Investigators turned the scene back over to the property owner after about four days of picking through debris in the burned buildings.