Man torches wife for cheating, sending nude photo to another man

With glassy eyes and a calm demeanor, vicious firebug Carlos Diaz recounted how he blow-torched his estranged wife earlier this month ”to give her a little pain,” so 38-year-old Harlem mom Cathy Zapata “would learn a lesson." “Now she can worry about our kid and get serious instead of focusing on going out and other men," said a heartless Diaz during a 40-minute interview Friday from a dingy Rikers Island visitors room. Diaz turned himself in Jan. 16, after setting the woman aflame in an Inwood lot, then dousing his old auto shop with gasoline.

Diaz told the Daily News he was set off when he discovered a nude photo Zapata — who had recently gotten some cosmetic surgery done — had sent of herself to another man on her cell phone. “I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to pass out,” said Diaz, 35, nervously looking toward the ground. “I had to do something.” He stewed about the snapshot overnight, and the next morning lured Zapata to the parking lot where the unemployed mechanic had been sleeping most nights. Then, he unleashed the blowtorch. “I had to be a man about it. She hurt my pride,” he said of the woman who had dumped him. “I knew it was going to end up in a place like this but I didn’t care.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/teach-lesson-man-torches-wife-cheating-article-1.1248320