Results tagged “blacksunday”

Earlier this year, the current and former owners of a Bronx apartment building whose tenants illegally subdivided their apartments and essentially created a maze that killed two firefighters in 2005, were found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment. Now defense lawyers are trying to throw out the conviction, because one of the jurors contacted one of the witnesses. Newsday reports, "The social networking site Facebook took center stage in a Bronx courtroom Friday with the unsealing of gushing e-mails from a juror" to firefighter Brendan Cawley, who had testified. Apparently Karen Krell unsuccessfully tried to contact Cawley via Facebook during the trial; she continued to message him—"I'm awed at what you and the others went through, and what you yourself still continue to go through"— until he responded. She wrote, post-trial, to her fellow jurors, "So I finally found Brendon on facebook and we wrote some letters to each other (just about the trial, nothing else!! =( ...LOL)." A defendant's lawyer said, "You're entitled to 12, not 11 unbiased witnesses."

Firefighter Jeffrey Cool described the conditions of the January 23, 2005 fire that claimed the lives of two firefighters, "I saw flames from the floor to the ceiling... It was just real crazy. It was starting to get like hell in there." The tenants of a Bronx building, as well as the building's owner and manager, face manslaughter charges for illegally subdividing the space, essentially creating a death trap for the firefighters. The fire also raised questions about the FDNY's decision to stop supplying ropes to firefighters (Lt. Curtis Meyran and Firefighter John G. Bellew leaped to escape the blaze, but died, while Cool had a personal safety rope he bought). Cool admitted he sued the FDNY over not supplying ropes, but the Post reports he was testy when the defense lawyer asked him how long it took to fight the fire, "That's a good question. Because I was laying on my back in the alley."