Lupica: Kids' faces always on the minds of FDNY — 'In our world, you never forget the children'

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Sunday, March 22, 2015, 10:59 PM

Updated: Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 8:01 PM

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The code for those injured or killed in another fire in the city is “1045.” When he got the call just after midnight, in the first minutes of Saturday morning, FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro heard what his men had already heard at Engine 255 and Ladder 157, Rogers Ave. and Flatbush:

“Fire in Brooklyn, multiple 1045s.”

He does not know at the time how many of the victims on this night, a terrible night in Brooklyn, are children. The first firefighters from the FDNY were on the scene in three minutes and 25 seconds, but already it was too late on Bedford Ave., near Avenue L, for seven children in the Sassoon family.

Nigro started out as a kid in the FDNY in 1969. Over the past two days he has talked to others who have done this kind of work in this city for a very long time. Not one of them could ever remember a fire taking seven members from the same family.

“The fire was at the front door when they got there,” Nigro said. “So they knew they were up against it. They just didn’t know they were going to find that many children in three of those four bedrooms.”

This time the fire at the front door was 3371 Bedford Ave., in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. This time tragedy was ignited by a hot plate used by an Orthodox Jewish mother to heat food, in accordance with laws of her faith against lighting a flame on the Sabbath. Then before these children, seven of Gayle Sassoon’s eight, had a chance, there were flames everywhere in the night.

“This is one of the nights no one on the scene will ever forget,” Nigro said Sunday. “In our world, you never forget the children.”

He is the son of a fire captain. He started out at Engine 21 in Manhattan, on 40th St. He was a lieutenant later at Engine 35 in East Harlem, a captain after that at Engine 8, 51st St. between Lexington and Third. He served until 2002 and retired and now he has come back to serve as commissioner for Bill de Blasio. He has seen a lot of bad things, because that is his world in his city. He is another who will not forget this night on Bedford Ave. for as long as he lives.

“There was an infant I carried out of a burning building when I was 22,” Nigro said. “I tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was already too late.” He paused and said, “That was the first child for me.”

Then the commissioner of the FDNY said, “Now we get a night like this. Seven children this time.”

He talked on this day about fires being at a record low in the city but how, even with that, the numbers average out to a fire death every four or five days. Another grim reality of his world, in his city. Again: His men are there in a few minutes in Brooklyn, but by the time they are inside this house on this night, it has been ravaged by this fire.

As always, they go running in behind their hoses, bringing with them training and instinct and courage, not knowing how many children they will find inside. Then they get the children out windows to other firemen on ladders. It is too late, just because it is sometimes.

The mother, badly burned, could not make it through the fire to the back bedrooms. She finally made it out a window. So did one of her daughters. The father was in Manhattan on business. The fire took everyone else from them. Resuscitation did not save these children the way Nigro could not save an infant when he was a kid out of Engine 21.

It is one more reality in the lives of those who run into places like this, some of them like this one without smoke detectors on the first or second floors: Sometimes they do everything right, and the ending is still terribly and tragically and permanently wrong.

“They knew as soon as they went running up the steps that their chances were slim, even as quickly as they got inside and pushed back,” Nigro said. “But this is what the members of our department do. They keep going.”

Then he was not talking as the commissioner of that department, he was talking as a father and grandfather, about the aftermath of what happened, how quickly it all happened, once the first call came in at 12:23 Saturday morning, multiple 1045s in Brooklyn.

“None of us can imagine,” Nigro says, “what it must be like for these parents.”

You always hear this about the extraordinary men and women of the FDNY: They run into these buildings when others are running out. Only this time, seven children never got the chance to run. They were already gone when Engine 255 and Ladder 157 arrived, fire greeting them at the front door, 3371 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn.