Eight Days Passed Before Durham Police Called It Arson, and by Then the Building Had Already Been Torn Down: the Fire That Took the Mcintosh-Anderson-Kellam Funeral Home Off King Street East (Originally Reported September 15, 2026)

OSHAWA — This file was published by Durham Regional Police on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 and is not a story that broke today. The fire itself was eight days earlier. At approximately 4:05 a.m. on Monday, September 7, 2026, Central East Division officers were called to assist fire crews at the Mcintosh-Anderson-Kellam Funeral Home at 152 King Street East in Oshawa. No injuries were reported to police. Eight days later the service published a single finding: “Through further investigation, it was determined that the fire was caused as a result of arson.” It publishes nothing else. No occurrence number, no point of origin, no accelerant, no damage figure, no suspect, no vehicle, and no motive.

The timing matters because of what happened in between. The building did not survive the week. Oshawa fire crews spent September 7 working hot spots in the upper floors, and the structure was demolished. By the time Durham Regional Police told the public that someone had set the fire deliberately, the thing they were describing was gone.

A Single Sentence Doing All the Work

The operative line in this release is eleven words long, and everything that makes the file serious is compressed into it. “It was determined that the fire was caused as a result of arson” is a conclusion, not an account. It does not say who determined it, on what basis, or when. It does not say whether the determination came from Durham investigators, from Oshawa Fire Services, or from the Office of the Fire Marshal, which is ordinarily the body that establishes cause in a fire of this size. The release does not mention the Fire Marshal at all.

Nor does it say what changed. A fire attended at four in the morning on September 7 was, for eight days, a fire. On September 15 it became an arson. The release gives no indication whether that turn came from a scene examination, from video, from a witness, or from something recovered before the building came down. The demolition makes the question sharper rather than academic: whatever the scene held, it is no longer available to be re-examined.

The Building, and What Was Inside It

The facts in this section do not come from the police release, which says nothing about the business at all, and they are set out separately for that reason.

The funeral home traces its operation to 1853 and had stood at 152 King Street East since 1933. Current owners John and Willie Kellam took the business over in 1995. Reporting establishes that no bodies were in the building when it burned, that all cremated remains held there were recovered, and that they were relocated to Mount Lawn Funeral Home and Cemetery in Whitby, which becomes the business’s permanent home. Durham Regional Police address none of this. The release does not name the owners, does not state what was in the building, and does not say whether anything was in it that would explain why someone set it alight.

What Is Not Reported

No suspect, of any description, and no statement of how many people investigators are looking for beyond the plural. No vehicle. No direction of travel. No point of origin within the building. No accelerant. No dollar figure for the damage. No occurrence number — unusual for a Durham release, and it means this file cannot be cross-referenced against the service’s other records by number. No statement of whether the business, its owners or anyone connected to it had received threats, and no statement of whether the fire is connected to any other file.

No motive of any kind is offered. Durham Regional Police do not say the business was targeted and do not say it was not. They do not describe the fire as suspicious in the sense of an open question; they state flatly that it was arson and stop there.

And no gang, street gang, criminal organization or outlaw motorcycle club has been named by Durham Regional Police, by any outlet, or by anyone else in connection with this fire. None is named or implied here. Commercial arson in Ontario carries associations this site has covered elsewhere; nothing in this file supports attaching any of them to it, and nothing here does.

Nobody has been arrested and nobody has been charged. Nothing above has been tested in court.