By Gene Warner and Brian Meyer
The Buffalo News
BUFFALO, N.Y. — A mysterious scream for help and a knock on the wall of a Genesee Street deli may provide investigators with clues about the origin of a fire that killed two Buffalo firefighters early Monday.
An ashen-faced Fire Commissioner Michael S. Lombardo identified the firefighters as Lt. Charles W. “Chip” McCarthy Jr., 45, of Rescue 1, and Firefighter Jonathan S. Croom, 34, of Ladder 7.
“Our hearts are broken,” Lombardo said, fighting back tears during a brief news conference outside Erie County Medical Center. “This is a family, and we lost two members of our family.”
McCarthy, a 22-year veteran of the department who comes from a family of Buffalo firefighters, is survived by his wife, Terry, three children and a 6-month-old grandchild. Croom, a 10-year veteran, leaves a 9-month-old child and his fiancee; fire officials said he lost a young child a few years ago.
The loss of two lives Monday represented the darkest day for the Buffalo Fire Department in more than 25 years. On Dec. 27, 1983, five firefighters and two civilians were killed in a propane explosion on North Division Street.
“This underscores how difficult and dangerous the work is that our firefighters do,” Mayor Byron W. Brown said at the scene. “Every day they go to work, they’re heroes.”
An estimated 300 to 400 on- and off-duty firefighters watched in horror as their colleagues pulled the two bodies from the basement of the Super Speedy Deli, 1815 Genesee, at about 9:40 a.m., almost six hours after the fire broke out. The building is at Genesee and Burgard Place, a block west of Bailey Avenue.
The firefighters apparently fell through holes in the first floor while searching for a possible civilian victim.
McCarthy, assigned to a team whose members are trained to find and free trapped victims, was the first firefighter to fall through the floor.
He had depleted one oxygen tank, came out to replace it and then re-entered the building just before the accident happened, said Firefighter Vincent R. Gugliuzza, vice president of Local 282, Buffalo Professional Firefighters Association.
McCarthy pressed a distress button on his radio for help, saying, “Basement, I’m in the basement,” said Daniel M. Cunningham, president of the firefighters union.
Croom, who was working on his scheduled day off, responded to McCarthy’s mayday call and also fell through the collapsed floor, Cunningham said.
Just before the bodies were removed on gurneys draped with American flags, firefighters and civilians alike took off their helmets or hats in respect of the fallen firefighters.
While fire officials and fellow firefighters paid tribute to the men Lombardo described as “two tremendous firefighters,” investigators are trying to determine how the fire started inside the delicatessen.
Investigation underway
McCarthy and Croom were among a legion of firefighters responding to a 3:49 a.m. alarm who were told that someone appeared to be trapped inside the basement of the two-story brick building.
Whether there was such a person inside remained a mystery late Monday. Witnesses making the original 911 call said they heard a man scream for help, but authorities have not found another body.
Investigators late Monday still were trying to determine whether the three-alarm fire was sparked by an arsonist, a burglar trying to flee or some other cause.
“We do not know yet,” Lombardo said in the news conference. “It is under investigation.”
City inspections officials said they interviewed the owner of the building Monday, a man they identified as Adel Abdulla of Lackawanna.
A former owner of the building, Ehmed Mallahi, who still lives in an adjoining structure, said he was jolted awake by alarms of some sort. Based on what he observed shortly after the fire broke out, Mallahi said, he thinks the building was unoccupied at the time.
“It’s a shame they risked lives, because I don’t think there was anyone in there at the time,” Mallahi said.
However, Hamood Abdulla, who lived upstairs from the deli, said he heard what appeared to a burglar alarm. He went outside, didn’t see anything, called the owner and later smelled smoke. That’s when he called 911.
Meanwhile, a passer-by came by and yelled, “Does anybody need help?” according to Abdulla. “Somebody from inside said, ‘Help me!’ ” he added. “He kept saying, ‘Help me.’ ”
That’s the information that emergency crews were given as they approached the burning building.
“On a 911 call, there were reports of someone banging on a wall and calling for help,” Lombardo told reporters.
It’s possible that both neighbors were correct — that a civilian was inside the building but fled before firefighters arrived.
Abdulla, the upstairs neighbor, provided his own theory about what might have happened to a possible intruder in the deli.
“Probably when the alarm went off, he tried to find his way out [in the dark], and he probably tried to light something to get out,” Abdulla said.
Authorities did not confirm or deny that scenario.
Cunningham, the fire union president, said the fallen firefighters were following standard operating procedures.
“Their jobs were to search — to look for victims who were reported in that building,” he said.
Cunningham added that venturing into a burning structure can be terrifying.
“The smoke, the heat and the fear are sometimes unbearable,” he said. “You’re going somewhere where you don’t know where you’re going to end up.”
Lombardo said efforts were made to rescue the men.
“Crews made multiple, multiple attempts to try to get into the place where those firefighters were trapped. Unfortunately, they were beat back by fire at the time, as well as [by concerns] about further collapse of the floors,” he said.
Sorting through wreckage
Demolition crews started to dismantle the building piece by piece at midafternoon, a process city officials estimated will take a couple of days.
By nightfall, much of it was down.
“What they don’t knock down are the possible areas of origin,” Buffalo Police spokesman Michael J. DeGeorge said late Monday. “They’re clearing space to get to the possible areas of origin.”
“Progressive” demolition will allow crews to continue checking for an additional body in the event a third person perished, said James W. Comerford Jr., city inspections chief.
Investigators said they believed that the fire began in the basement.
Mohammad Alwi, who identified himself as a relative of the deli’s current owner, said he believed that cigarettes and T-shirts were among the items that were stored in the basement. There also might have been cigarette lighters on the premises for sale, both Alwi and Mallahi said. Mallahi owned the building for 15 years, he said, before he sold it last year.
As news of the trapped firefighters circulated through the city, the scene turned into an agonizing wait for friends and co-workers of the fallen firefighters. Many of them stood near the burned-out building, arms folded, heads down, waiting for word.
Grief was written all over the faces of an ever-growing contingent of off-duty firefighters, most dressed in shorts and blue Buffalo Fire Department T-shirts or sweat shirts, as they waited for the inevitable news.
The deaths were confirmed at about 9:50 a.m. by the Rev. Derren L. Young, ECMC trauma chaplain.
It is very difficult when anybody loses a loved one, especially when they serve our community as police or firefighters, Young told reporters. “They’re ministers to our community,” he said. “To lose them, I can’t explain. . . . We need much praying for all the families and everyone involved. But for the grace of God, it could have been any of them.”
Young then turned to the subject of the grieving families.
“They’re traumatized by the whole event, as we all would be,” Young said. “We just lift them up and tell them God still loves them.”
The site of Monday’s tragedy is almost directly across the street from Wende Street, a block and a half from where Firefighter Mark P. Reed lost his right leg after being critically injured in an arson in June 2007. He also suffered a skull fracture, broken ribs and a punctured lung when a brick chimney from the vacant house toppled on his head and body.
Several firefighters said Reed was at the scene Monday paying his respects.
Cunningham said that when emergencies occur, firefighters are “dedicated” to protecting lives and don’t even think about long-festering labor disputes.
“When that bell rang this morning, nobody was thinking then that the city hasn’t [given raises] in seven years,” Cunningham said. ". . . What they thought about was getting on that rig, getting on the scene and protecting the citizens of the City of Buffalo.”
The Rev. Francis X. Mazur, an ECMC chaplain, met Monday with the victims’ family members. All of them want to know why, he said, adding, “We have no answers for them.”
The Associated Press and Staff Reporters Peter Simon and T.J. Pignataro contributed to this report.
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