Two of our Bravest were killed, and four more were injured, responding to a fire in a building owned and managed by Cesar Rios and others.
Although the inferno was triggered by an apartment's unsafe electrical wiring, prosecutors argued that the firefighters lost their lives due to the existence an illegal partition of which the owners supposedly knew about and failed to correct.
After a Bronx County Supreme Court jury found Rios and his fellow defendants guilty of criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment in the second degree, the judge granted the defendants' request to set aside the verdict.
Since there was no evidence establishing that the defendants had "actual knowledge" of the illegal condition's existence, the Appellate Division, First Department, thought that the jury's determination was based on "speculation and conjecture" and thus had been correctly vacated.
If only walls could talk.
To view a copy of the Appellate Division's decision, please use this link: People v. Rios