35 Years after Happy Land: Recalling a Bronx Mass Murder by Arson

The call from the Channel 2 assignment desk woke me before dawn on Sunday, March 25, 1990....35 years ago this week.

The editor, Tom Farkas, thought my news brain would go into instant overdrive on my day off, when he delivered some astounding news: 87 people were dead in a Bronx social club fire that was deliberately set.

I initially thought he was making it up. It turned out to be tragically true.

When I got to the scene on Southern Boulevard in the East Tremont section of the Bronx, I wasn't quite prepared for what I was witnessing. Scores of black body bags were stacked in rows along the sidewalk, proof that this was a catastrophic event. The sign affixed to the second floor of the rundown building had HAPPY LAND in large letters that were partially scorched.

Happy Land sign was partially scorched, when reporters arrived to find scores of body bags outside.

We soon learned police had tracked down the ex-boyfriend of the coat check lady, who confessed he had set the fire in a fit of anger.

Julio Gonzalez had argued with his on and off girlfriend in the early hours of March 25, as the music blared from the DJ's booth in the club. Bouncers threw Gonzalez out about 3 a.m. and sent the girlfriend home in a cab.

The 35 year old Gonzalez was enraged and walked to a nearby Amoco station, where he bought a one dollar container of gas.

Police learned he returned to the club and threw the accelerant at the bottom of the first-floor staircase, setting the place on fire. This staircase was the only exit from the unlicensed Happy Land.

Julio Gonzalez was convicted of 87 murders in the 1990 arson fire at the Happy Land social club in the Bronx.

Former Bronx Homicide Commander William Sean O'Toole was a sergeant overseeing the Crime Scene Unit in 1990, when he was called about the catastrophe not long after the fire was set.

"First, I was told there's like eight bodies on the sidewalk," Lt. O'Toole remembered, when he recounted the story before his retirement in 2023. The situation was much more dire.

Bodies were clumped together in the second floor stairwell or inside the club, where many victims suffocated from smoke inhalation or were trampled in a desperate stampede to escape.

"Eighteen or so people were burned," Lt. O'Toole told me in a phone interview, when I was later working at PIX11 News. "The rest of the people looked like they were sleeping. You saw a girlfriend and boyfriend holding each other on the floor."

Only six people managed to get out alive.

Happy Land had no fire exits or smoke alarms or sprinklers.

It had been ordered closed months before the fire but continued to operate.

A Social Club Task Force was formed in the weeks after the inferno, with about a third of the city's illegal establishments closed in the months that followed.

When we looked into the background of Julio Gonzalez, we learned that he had come to the United States from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift in 1980.

When detectives tracked him down after the fire, primarily because he left the gas canister near the scene, he confessed to the investigators: "I got angry, the devil got to me, and I set the fire."

He was sentenced to 87, concurrent life sentences in prison on September 19, 1991.

Julio Gonzalez at his sentencing in 1991, where he received 87 concurrent life sentences in prison.

(Pool Photo: Michael Schwartz)

After his initial parole was denied in March 2015--25 years after the fire--Julio Gonzalez later died of a heart attack in the Clinton Correctional Facility--close to the Canadian border--on September 13, 2016. He was 61 years old.

Julio Gonzalez died at age 61 in 2016 in the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border in Dannemora, New York. (DOCCS)

30-foot high concrete walls surround the perimeter of the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate Dannemora, New York.