are you thinking, i ve gotta spring into action here in case someone needs to be rescued? i started yelling, i started pounding on the door as hard as i could, just to see if there was any activity, see if anybody was home. reporter: anything? all the lights were off, everything was quiet. when i went around to the side, the amount of smoke and the amount of flames the basement was fully engulfed. reporter: you have no gear nothing i also noticed that the neighbor had a spigot nearby. i was pouring water on the windowsill, but that fire inside was rolling. [ sirens ] reporter: once inside the burning house firefighters discovered a badly burned body in a basement bedroom. it was shortly before two in the morning, when bergen county arson investigator sgt. terry lawler got a wake up call from his boss. we have a fatal fire in teaneck, new jersey. gives me the address on elm avenue and says, i m headin out there. and i ll meet you there.
because dna evidence is always important. reporter: later that morning autopsy results confirmed the prosecutor s hunch. the medical examiner had found a small hole at the base of rob cantor s skull, and bullet fragments inside. who killed rob cantor and why, were questions that would lead investigators far from the still smoldering house on elm avenue. when we come back, what had happened in that house? reporter: diabolical? yeah, despicable. reporter: turns out, there wasn t just one case of fire and murder in this county
stranger near the cantor home shortly before the fire. did you hear about the stranger that was in the area? yes. can you tell us about that? yeah. we weren t able to track who the person was and we tried through canvassing to trace, but we never had him coming outside of the house or we never had him going inside the house. reporter: according to rob s friends, someone had been stalking him. about a year earlier, they said rob told them he d gotten some creepy emails, which suggested that he was being watched. this is one of them rob, saw you this morning with this woman on upper west side. how are things with her? very, very strange email addresses, strange names. one was e-o-r-a-l-l-d. another one was e-o-r-2-4-7. reporter: assistant prosecutor brian sinclair who heads the county s computer crimes unit, says the emails seemed intended to intimidate. imagine that rob was getting these emails, being quite troubled that somebody knew where he was at a particular tim
tell me, how did this happen? what happened yesterday that made you notice what was happening? reporter: well, i was just sitting at home and i was sitting at my kitchen table and my girlfriend sent me a text saying are you okay. i had no idea what she was talking about. and then she sent me a link. when i walked outside, i just walked i m on the corner house of cloverdale and garden view and i turned the corner, and this big black cloud of smoke reporter: so you had no idea what was going on and you come outside and that s what you see. i panicked. i went inside and collected all my photographs, grabbed my computer, my stuff out of my safe and my dog and my son was able to get in so he helped me pack up some stuff and we just kind of took off. reporter: and this has happened before. nine years ago we were evacuated. my house was safe. it didn t happen up here. but it was the closest call. so i actually still had my pictures in the boxes from the first time it had happene
the president s feud with the high-profile republican senator bob corker and the president s tweets this morning on immigration and the nfl. a lot to discuss with my next guest. francis rooney of florida is a member of the house foreign affairs committee. also the house senate joint economic committee. and serving his first term in congress and previously served as ambassador to the vatican under president george w. bush. congressman, president trump basically at war with senate foreign relations committee chairman bob corker. and corker says trump is on a path to world war iii. what do you think? well, i think all that is distractive from the pursuit of the mission of protecting u.s. interests in light of these very difficult problems you just for sure. but that s the president himself causing this distraction. do you agree with bob corker? or the president? well, i don t think any of it is helpful on either side. steve bannon thinks corker