A man police say was identified on video slipping through a fence and climbing into the boarded-up Cheyenne Historic Pumphouse moments before flames tore through the 134-year-old building Saturday night has been arrested.
The Cheyenne Police Department announced Friday that surveillance video captured a man, identified as 35-year-old Christophe Carabajal, entering the pumphouse through a ground-floor window shortly before fire tore through the vacant building.
No one else was seen entering or leaving the property, according to the CPD’s Friday report.
The historic structure was already engulfed in flames by the time firefighters arrived around 9:30 p.m.
The blaze ripped through the roof and attic of the building building, sending flames into the night sky above the old rail corridor and drawing a large emergency response from Cheyenne Fire Rescue, Laramie County Fire Authority, F.E. Warren Air Force Base, and the Cheyenne Police Department.
Investigators later concluded the fire was human caused after ruling out electrical issues, environmental causes, and nearby railroad activity, according to the CPD. Officials said the building had no utilities connected.
Carabajal was arrested Thursday on an unrelated public intoxication charge. Detectives have since submitted a probable cause affidavit to the Laramie County District Attorney’s Office seeking additional arson-related charges.
As of Friday afternoon, those arson charges had not yet been filed with the Laramie County Circuit Court. A first court appearance for him also hadn’t been set.
Still Standing
Long before it became an abandoned shell repeatedly targeted by vandals and vagrants, the pumphouse was part of the machinery that helped build Cheyenne into a railroad town.
Constructed in the late 1800s, the building once supplied water for steam locomotives moving through southeast Wyoming. Later, it served as a city storage facility before eventually sitting vacant for years.
Even in its deteriorated condition, the structure remained something of a local landmark — an aging sandstone survivor tucked near the tracks.
“It was devastating, it was gut-wrenching,” said Marren Kallas the morning after the fire. She's the vice president for Historic Cheyenne Inc. who spent years researching the pumphouse and working to save it.
“It was like witnessing a death, for sure,” she said.
The building had already become a difficult preservation puzzle for the city. Restoration estimates before the fire were reportedly around $4 million, and city leaders had openly wrestled with whether the structure could realistically be saved.
Cheyenne Mayor Patrick Collins told Cowboy State Daily earlier this week that the he and the City Council has tried hard not to become “the council to tear it down.”
Despite the damage, there is still some hope the pumphouse may not be entirely lost. Officials have said the thick sandstone and brick walls appeared to remain standing even after the roof collapsed.
The old building has survived catastrophe before.
According to local historians, the structure endured the devastating 1904 flood that tore through Cheyenne and killed several people. More than a century later, the weathered walls were still standing after Saturday’s fire.
A weekend fire that gutted Cheyenne’s Historic Pumphouse may not be the end for the run-down 134-year-old building that, as recent as six months ago, was set for demolition. “We’ve really tried hard not to be the council to tear it down,” says the mayor. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily) 
Cheyenne City Project Manager Paul Belotti shines a flashlight on some of the graffiti inside the Historic Pumphouse. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
A weekend fire that gutted Cheyenne’s Historic Pumphouse may not be the end for the run-down 134-year-old building that, as recent as six months ago, was set for demolition. “We’ve really tried hard not to be the council to tear it down,” says the mayor. (Greg Johnson, Cowboy State Daily) 
Wild patches of weeds poke up out of the filled-in reservoir that used to be located here, in what is actually the backside of the pumphouse. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Many of the messages left on the walls of the pumphouse have at least one word that doesn't quite make sense. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily)
A Familiar Problem With Empty Buildings
Officials say the old pumphouse had experienced repeated unlawful entry attempts for years despite efforts to secure the site.
That has become a familiar issue for vacant historic buildings across Wyoming communities, where old schools, railroad facilities, hospitals and industrial structures often sit in limbo for years because restoration costs far outpace available funding.
Some become magnets for vandalism, copper theft, graffiti, squatting or fires.
For Cheyenne residents, though, the pumphouse is one of the last physical reminders of the city’s railroad beginnings — a soot-stained relic from the era when steam engines shaped the economy and identity of southern Wyoming.
Now, city officials and preservation advocates are left waiting to see whether the old structure’s final chapter has already been written, or whether the battered sandstone building still has one more fight left in it.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
