June 12, 2007
Possible Bronx Fire Lawsuit Against City
It's been three months since the tragic fire in a Bronx family home that claimed the lives of one adult and nine children. Mamadou Soumare, who lost his wife and four children in the blaze, has filed a notice of claim, with the FDNY, Department of Buildings, Department of Housing Preservation and even his cousin, Moussa Magassa, who owned the building, as possible defendants.
The fire was started by an overheated space heater cord on the first floor on March 7, and the house did not have working smoke detectors either. Soumare claims the FDNY didn't respond in a timely manner"; the FDNY arrived 3 minutes 23 seconds after a neighbor called 911, the residents tried to put the fire out themselves before going outside for help. And when the FDNY arrived, a gate to the back of the house was locked.
The claim also says that Magassa was "negligent in his ownership and operation of the premises" and that city agencies should have inspected the building more often. Magassa did hire a contractor to put sprinklers and a metal staircase into the home, but work was held up because paperwork was incomplete.
Soumare, a cab driver who returned home to discover the fire and that most of his family was gone (one child was in the hospital, but later died), would be seeking $100 million in damages, if he sues. Soumare's attorney told the Post, "Clearly he's not engaged in an adversarial [action]. His interest is in going forward and rebuilding his life. People have reached into their own pockets to help this man out of...the plight that he's gone through." The city's comment was, "Obviously this involves a very tragic case, and we certainly will review the case thoroughly."
Photograph by Louis Lanzano/AP
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3 minutes and 23 seconds response time by the FDNY sounds pretty damn good to me.
No one can possibly say they didn't see this one coming. People are so opportunistic. How can he possibly blame the city for this? I hope whoever the judge is on this lawsuit will toss his ass in jail for wasting everyone's time with a frivolous lawsuit.
god bless america
The response time of 3:23 is over a minute faster than the citywide FDNY response time for March which was 4:28 for structure fires. You also need to take into account that the FDNY only gets called out to a job once a fire has been reported.
The greed of Mamadou Soumare makes the whole thing even more tragic, although he has learned the lessons of America very well - get a lawyer and sue.
ok, now can we deport the ungrateful son-of-a-bitch?
I just lost all sympathy for him. He's even planning to sue his brother, or cousin, or whatever the hell the owner of the home was? The guy who also lost his children in the fire? Didn't the city rally behind them and didn't they get a bunch of donations to fly the bodies back home for burial? What a greedy, ungrateful son of a bitch... Not to mention the lawyer, who surely talked him into this, and who should be fined and disbarred for wasting the city's resources with this asinine lawsuit.
hrm, yeah... yes it is tragic but i feel like 3:23 is a pretty good response time and from what i read the inhabitants didn't have good response times or tactics of their own. i wouldn't say some sort of lawsuit in and of itself is way out of line, but this seems "adversarial" in spirit.
If it were me, I'd be pretty pissed off that the owner of the building didn't have working smoke detectors installed, regardless of whether he was my cousin or not.
Even if you give Soumare the benefit of the doubt and assume he's been brainwashed/scammed by vulturish lawyers like Wesley Autrey, the whole thing still comes down to the ambulance chasers. There really needs to be some kind of legal practice reform in NYS.
One thing that would neat to see is a weekly/monthly report of how much the city has had to pay out in settlements or judgements after these bullshit cases. SFist has a similar feature for Muni's slip-and-fall payouts, which usually total between $50k and $250k every time they post.