VIDEO: Investigators say a night of drinking and other bad decisions by a security guard led to a devastating fire last month at the Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. Investigators say security guard Matthew Luxon not only left his post to go drinking with friends, but he brought them back to work with him, and that's when things really got out of hand. Investigators say Luxon and two friends were shooting a gun from the balcony. Next, they say Luxon and one of the friends, Lyle Thompson, rolled makeshift joints from plants on the balcony and smoked them in the maintenance room. But they started coughing.
“During that coughing episode, the cigarettes fell out of their hands, igniting paper, which ignited the room on fire,” Mark Torres, with the Office of Superintendent of Insurance, said.
Crews say the fire triggered the sprinklers and prompted the alarm-monitoring company to call the center.