By MYUNG OAK KIM & DANA DIFILIPPO
Philadelphia Daily News
The firefighters descended into the dark, cluttered rowhouse basement where heat and smoke mounted by the second. But they couldn’t find the fire.
Engine 28 Capt. John Taylor and firefighters Rey Rubio and William Studley withstood the heat and smoke, groping around in the pitch-black room, their equipment getting caught on furniture. They waited for a glimpse of flames. But as the minutes dragged on, the firefighters began to run out of air in their oxygen tanks.
Studley found his way to the stairs and got out of the Port Richmond rowhouse, but Rubio and Taylor became disoriented. By the time fellow firefighters got them out of the house, it was too late. Rubio and Taylor had suffocated.
In his opening statement yesterday at the Criminal Justice Center in the trial of Daniel Brough, Assistant District Attorney Ed Cameron blamed the firefighters’ deaths on Brough’s reckless basement marijuana-growing operation.
Cameron asserted that Brough, a contractor who lived with his wife and kids in the house on Belgrade Street, had known that his rigged wooden closet with a 1,000-watt grow lamp was an extreme fire hazard.
Brough, 37, indicated in his daily journal of the pot operation that he knew the closet was getting too hot, Cameron told the jurors in the courtroom of Common Pleas Judge David N. Savitt.
“Nobody exactly knows what ignited that day, but that doesn’t matter,” Cameron said. “What matters is that the defendant created a very dangerous situation.
“What he did, in effect, was create an oven.”
Brough pleaded not guilty to charges of third-degree murder and numerous lesser charges in connection with the deaths of Taylor, 53, of Northeast Philadelphia, and Rubio, 42, of North Philadelphia, who responded to a fire in Brough’s basement on Aug. 20, 2004.
Defense lawyer William Cannon called the deaths of Taylor and Rubio “an unspeakable tragedy.” He denied, however, that Brough had intended to cause their deaths.
Cannon said a fire expert would testify that the fire did not start in the marijuana closet, but in the adjacent tool closet. He told the jury that the plant-growing operation had been safely working for years before the fatal fire and that it had been designed so that the temperature in the closet never exceeded 87 degrees.
He told the jury that homicide cases usually involve someone with criminal intent to kill another person.
“This is not such a case,” Cannon said. “This is about an accidental death of Captain Taylor and Officer Rubio.”
Cannon said Brough had grown the plants, which he termed his “girls,” for his own use, and denied the prosecution’s charge that he intended to sell the illegal substance.
Before opening arguments, Judge Savitt denied a defense motion to prohibit the use of Brough’s diary at trial. The notebook is key to prosecutors’ efforts to show that Brough knew his pot hothouse could erupt into a fiery blaze.
A judge a year ago threw out murder charges against Brough. But after the District Attorney’s Office refiled the charges, another judge last November upheld them, swayed primarily by Brough’s own words.
Just 16 days before the blaze, Brough noted in his diary that the heat in the basement pot closet was rising and that the marijuana buds had begun to dry.
“Had to bend them all over. Too tall... They are hitting the glass. The buds are burning. Don’t want that to happen,” he wrote.