They ran out of the house one by one, several of them bald and nearly naked, their hair and clothes burned off in a New Year’s blaze that police say was set by a relative wielding kerosene and a homemade torch. 

“Everyone came out yelling, ‘He’s crazy! He’s crazy!'” neighbor Viviana Bruno, 31, told The Associated Press as she recalled the fire that claimed five lives and critically injured several people. 

“It was like a horror movie,” she said. 

The first person out of the two-story home nestled near the mountains of the central Puerto Rican town of Florida was Samuel Molina. 

Molina was the first to die. Also dead is the suspect’s elderly mother, his teenage niece and his nephew, Jesus Sanchez, who recently became engaged and had flown from Seattle with his fiancee, 25-year-old Kate Donahue, so his family could meet her. 

The couple was part of a group of 14 people that suspect Justino Sanchez Diaz, 45, had invited to the house he shared with his parents and sister for an early New Year’s dinner, authorities said. 

Patricia Sanchez Vazquez, a doctoral candidate in the department of bacteriology and microbiology at the University of Wisconsin, survived the attack and is currently receiving burn treatment in Puerto Rico. 

Police said Sanchez Diaz already had doused the walls with gasoline and set canisters with fuel under furniture, including the dining room table. As the group sat down to eat, he came out with a tank of propane gas, doused people with kerosene and set them on fire with a homemade torch, police said. 

“It was something nobody expected,” local police Lt. Francisco Rosado said. “We haven’t even had five murders in the last decade.” 

Family members have not speculated on a motive, and police say Sanchez Diaz has kept silent and refused to eat since his arrest. 

Sanchez Diaz had been living and working in San Juan when he took over his father’s moving business, but he later became unemployed and moved to Florida. He waved occasionally to neighbors but kept to himself, said neighbor Jose Loubriel, 77, who was a cousin of the suspect’s dead mother. 

Several relatives who survived the blaze declined to comment, saying they did not want to jeopardize the investigation. 

“Through this pain that we’re experiencing we’re more united than ever,” Robles said, adding: “These wounds will take a long time to heal.” 

Minutes after the blaze began, Loubriel said he heard people yelling outside his house, asking that he help rescue his cousin, who was in her 80s and could not run out of the house. 

“When I entered the house, someone had already found her,” he said. “Imagine. I was in shock to see the condition of the house inside. And all those people, my God, all of them naked.” 

Florida’s mayor, Jose Aragon Parga, said the community is still in shock. 

“We have not had one violent death, and in one day, several people die,” he said. “Nobody thought it could happen.”

Katherine Krueger contributed to this report.