It was a day in New York City that no firefighter could forget: Six of the department’s own, battling a blaze in a Bronx apartment building on a brutally cold Sunday in 2005, became trapped on the fourth floor, hemmed in by illegal drywall partitions and unable to find the fire escape.
Two would die after jumping out of the building. Four others were severely injured, one of whom died six years later. On that same day, Jan. 23, 2005, another firefighter would die while fighting a house fire in Brooklyn.
Those fires, which claimed the lives of Lt. Curtis Meyran and Firefighter John Bellew in the Bronx, and Firefighter Richard Sclafani in Brooklyn, made that day the deadliest for firefighters in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.
On Monday, more than a decade after what came to be known as Black Sunday, a State Supreme Court jury in the Bronx awarded five of the firefighters who battled the Bronx blaze and their families $183 million in damages from the city and the building’s owner, a result their lawyer called long-awaited vindication. The family of the sixth firefighter had settled its case before the verdict.
About $140 million will be paid by the city, which the firefighters’ lawyer, Vito Cannavo, had argued was at fault because it had failed to equip firefighters with the proper ropes to escape. The rest will be paid by one of the building’s former owners, 234 East 178th Street L.L.C., which settled with all six firefighters and their families before the verdict. The judge has some discretion over the final amount.
During the trial, whose opening arguments were held in November, Mr. Cannavo said he had argued that not only had the city done away in 2000 with the ropes it once issued to firefighters for their safety, but it had also failed to make any effort to replace them, a choice he said had fatal consequences.
A spokesman for the Fire Department said that a number of policy changes resulted from the fire, and that all firefighters are now issued ropes.
A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said the jury had placed too much of the blame on the city.
“The city has always viewed this incident as a tragedy for the firefighters and their families, but we believe that the jury’s verdict does not fairly apportion liability in view of compelling evidence that established that the landlord’s numerous building code violations were directly responsible for this horrible event,” the spokesman, Nick Paolucci, said in a statement. “We will review the record and evaluate our legal options.”
A lawyer for 234 East 178th Street L.L.C. could not be reached for comment.
A criminal trial in 2009 against 234 East 178th Street L.L.C. and another former owner of the building, which focused largely on the illegal partitions, resulted in convictions on charges of criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment. But a judge overturned the conviction a year later.
That, said Mr. Cannavo, who represented five of the six firefighters, is why the verdict on Monday was “such a big case for them, because they finally got some vindication and some satisfaction.”