By Dustin Brown
The father of a teenager who accidentally started last year’s fatal Astoria hardware store fire has turned the tables by filing a lawsuit demanding $2 million from the store owners for his own injuries.
The court action, decried as reprehensible by many close to the Fire Department, will soon be followed by another lawsuit against the hardware store by the estate of one of three firefighters killed in the Father’s Day blaze, an attorney said Tuesday night.
In a suit filed in State Supreme Court in December, Silverio Moreno claims the owners of Long Island General Supply Co. “carelessly and negligently allowed and permitted the building to explode” June 17, leaving him with “severe and serious personal injuries.”
He asks for $2 million in damages for his suffering, according to the suit.
“It’s a crying shame that this man has the right to do this,” said Tom Butler, a spokesman for the Uniformed Firefighters Association. “He didn’t have the decency … to send sympathy cards to any of the three families of the firefighters who died that day, but he did have time to run to his lawyer’s office.”
Although an investigation found Moreno’s son and another boy responsible for the blaze, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown did not press charges because he deemed the fire an accident.
Gerard Misk, the attorney representing store owners Randy and Robert Gordon, said his clients “think it’s a frivolous suit.”
“They find it unnerving that the only person to bring a lawsuit in this case is the father of the person who started the fire,” he said.
The Father’s Day explosion killed Firefighter John Downing of Ladder Co. 163 and Firefighters Harry Ford and Brian Fahey of Rescue Co. 4, whose widows lashed out against the lawsuit.
“He should be just so thankful that he got his son off,” said Anne Downing, whose husband, John, was a native of Woodside. “He was able to spend Thanksgiving, he was able to spend Christmas, he was able to spend all the holidays with his son.”
Andrew Weitz, the attorney representing Downing’s estate, said he planned to file a lawsuit of his own against the hardware store and its owners “within the next two weeks.”
Although Weitz called Moreno’s lawsuit “reprehensible,” he agreed that “the owner of the building did not maintain his premises in a safe and proper way” and therefore bears responsibility for the explosion.
But Misk stressed this week that the owners “were in compliance and conformity with all of the regulations.”
“As far as we’re concerned, there is no question of their possible liability,” he said. “Nobody has ever come forth with any evidence that they were in any way responsible for this fire.”
Weitz said he is “confident that we’ll uncover information that will lay responsibility at the feet of the owner of the building.”
A joint investigation by the fire and police departments found that the fire started when Silverio Moreno’s teenage son and a friend from the Bronx knocked over a can of gasoline as they were spraying graffiti in the backyard of the store.
The gasoline trickled down a ramp and into the basement of the hardware store, where it was rapidly ignited by the pilot light of a water heater.
Moreno lived in a basement apartment that opened into a yard shared with Long Island General Supply.
The store is now open for business in a back warehouse while the Gordons “are still undertaking to rebuild at the old site,” Misk said.
Then-Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen had announced at a news conference shortly after the fire that Long Island General was not equipped with a basement sprinkler system despite a 1960s regulation requiring such sprinklers in all commercial buildings that store flammable materials. Because of the age of the 75-year-old family-owned store, the basement was most likely grandfathered into the law, allowing it to avoid compliance with new sprinkler regulations, Von Essen said.
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 154.
