Residents who watched a family survive the 2022 explosion are now confronting allegations that the father caused it.
PLUM, Pa. — On Hialeah Drive, the house is gone. What remains is a vacant lot, a fence line and a block of neighbors still measuring time by the night a home exploded and sent a family of five into the street injured and screaming.
The filing of charges against Jacob Rabb in March gave that block its first clear official answer after nearly four years of waiting. Police said Rabb intentionally caused the April 22, 2022, natural gas explosion while he, Laura Petty and their three sons were inside. That allegation did more than start a criminal case. It changed the meaning of a neighborhood disaster, turning what many residents had remembered as a terrible mystery into an alleged act carried out inside a family home.
Neighbors remember the sound first. Then came the fire, the shattered debris and the rush toward the family’s property. Akil Washington, who lived nearby, said he ran to help after hearing screams. He later described trying to tear down a fence to reach Petty as flames spread. In those first minutes, the people on the block were not thinking about criminal motives or utility data. They were thinking about whether anyone was alive. All five family members survived, though the oldest boy, then 11, suffered first-degree burns after escaping from the basement through a window. The adults and the two younger children also got out of the home, but the structure itself was destroyed.
For a long time, the street was left with questions instead of conclusions. Emergency officials had said the investigation would take time because of forensic testing on gas lines and appliances and because interviews had to continue long after the fire was out. That drawn-out process mattered in Plum, a borough with painful memories of other house explosions. A 2008 blast on Mardi Gras Drive, also in Holiday Park, killed a grandfather and injured a child after pipeline damage led to a gas failure. In 2023, another catastrophic explosion elsewhere in Plum killed multiple people. Against that backdrop, the unsolved Hialeah Drive blast felt less like an isolated event and more like part of a larger local fear about homes, gas and sudden destruction.
Police now say the cause was not a pipeline failure outside the home but a gas release inside it. According to the criminal complaint, investigators found unusually high gas consumption at the residence on three separate days during the month of the explosion. They alleged Rabb manually disconnected the dryer’s gas connection on those occasions, including the day of the blast, and that a nearby furnace likely ignited the vapors. A deputy fire marshal concluded the fire stemmed from natural gas released through manual manipulation of a gas line. Those technical findings, officials said, were later reinforced by personal evidence: Rabb’s father told police that his son admitted causing the explosion, and Petty said she found handwritten notes in a kitchen cabinet after the couple split.
The notes became some of the most striking details in the case. One said in part, “If I can’t have her no one will or my kids…” Another said, “P.S. I did blow up the house.” By then, Petty had filed a Protection from Abuse order, and police said Rabb later violated it and threatened her with a knife. In that sense, the case did not stay confined to one fire scene. It grew into a wider account of a relationship breakdown, alleged threats and evidence that investigators say connected the family’s private conflict to a public explosion that rattled an entire neighborhood.
Rabb, 41, was charged with multiple counts of attempted criminal homicide, aggravated arson and related offenses. He was arraigned and held without bail. At the time of the filing, a preliminary hearing had been set for March 18. For neighbors, that court date represented something larger than a routine procedural step. It marked the point where years of talk, memory and suspicion were finally being tested in a courtroom instead of on front porches and sidewalks.
What stands on Hialeah Drive now is absence: no home, no family life behind the windows, only a cleared parcel and a case file that has begun to explain what happened there. The next stage belongs to the courts, but the block has already entered a new phase, one in which the disaster has a name, a defendant and a set of allegations that residents can no longer separate from the place itself.
Author note: Last updated April 6, 2026.