After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival

by Robin Gaby Fisher

  It was no use. As the smoke swirled around them, one of the firefighters, then the other, picked themselves up off the floor. eighteen-year-old John Giunta was beyond saving. The firefighters took a sooty blanket and, sobbing like babies, gently covered his body.

  Frucci got a lump in his throat. He felt almost as bad for the firefighters as he did for the boy. How many times had he watched rescue workers fight valiantly to save a life when it was already too late? It made him both sad and proud.

  As the on-call investigator for the Essex County prosecutor’s office, Frucci had been one of the first officials on the scene, thirty minutes after the call came in. Frucci was thirty-one years old, but he’d been investigating fires for four years and had already earned a reputation as one of the best in his field. The South Orange fire chief had briefed him outside Boland Hall. Possible fatalities, the chief had said. Dozens of students injured. Most of them were already gone, whisked away to area hospitals by a fleet of ambulances a few minutes earlier.

  Frucci was horrified by what he found inside. The third floor looked like a dark, smoldering cave. As he walked a few steps down the hall from where Giunta’s body was found, looking for more victims, the air suddenly got hotter, and it stank of burned flesh, the stench so hard hitting that Frucci’s head flew back. There was no mistaking the odor, and you never got used to it. He gagged and then walked a few more steps toward the heat and the smell.

  Frucci stopped short. In front of him were the blackened corpses of two boys. Both had assumed what professionals call a pugilistic attitude. People who burned to death were often discovered in this bizarre position, lying with their knees bent and their arms held upright like a boxer’s at the beginning of a prize fight.

  Frucci looked around. He guessed that he was in the student lounge and that this was the place where the fire had started. Three couches smoldered, and the carpeting was melted like wax into the cement floor. It had obviously been an intensely hot blaze. The building’s cinder-block frame had held in the heat, and the temperature inside was still smothering. Frucci wiped the perspiration from his face. Ceiling tiles, still glowing red hot, were scattered where they had fallen. The walls were burned black, and electrical wires dangled like snakes from the cavity beyond the scorched ceiling. A holocaust, he thought.

  Through the smoke, Frucci saw a man dressed in black approaching. He walked slowly, tentatively. Monsignor Robert Sheeran was the president of Seton Hall University. Frucci knew him right away. As a child, Frucci had served as Sheeran’s altar boy.

  Sheeran had a commanding presence, but now he looked old and ghostlike. Walking through the wreckage, he went to each of the dead students, knelt down next to him, said a prayer over his body, and blessed him. Without speaking, he then turned and walked away.

  “Where’s the medical examiner?” Frucci asked a police officer. “We need to have the bodies taken away so we can start figuring out what happened here.”

  Chapter 2

  The sound of the telephone sliced through the predawn darkness. Hani Mansour grabbed it on the first ring.

  “What is it?” he mumbled without saying hello.

  No matter how deep his sleep, the fifty-three-year-old director of the Saint Barnabas burn unit always answered the phone before the first ring finished. It was a habit he had developed when his son, Nicholas, was a baby and slept in a bassinet beside his bed.

  The phone rang so often in the middle of the night that his wife, Claudette, didn’t even hear it anymore.

  “This is what we have,” the voice on the other end said. “There’s been a fire at Seton Hall. I’m hearing at least eight to ten victims. All young kids.”

  Chris Ruhren was in charge of the burn nurses at Saint Barnabas. She was blithe and smart and she had been treating burns longer than Mansour. They had a strong mutual respect for each other. As Ruhren continued to fill him in with the few details she knew, barely taking a breath between words, Mansour recognized the surge of adrenaline he himself felt every time his unit was about to be put to the test.

  “I’m leaving now,” he said, hanging up the phone.

  Claudette stirred.

  “What’s up?” she asked sleepily.

  “There’s a fire at Seton Hall,” Mansour said.

  Claudette Mansour worked alongside her husband in the burn unit, managing the administrative work he so disliked. He had grown the unit from its infancy, and she had helped nurture it into the respected, state-of-the-art burn center it now was. As her husband threw on the same gray slacks and blue striped button-down shirt he had worn the day before, she switched on the TV in their bedroom. The New York stations were all reporting the fire, but the details were sketchy. A building on the South Orange campus was on fire. No word of casualties yet. Claudette shivered. She thought about their son, Nicolas, who had left home four months earlier to begin his freshman year at American University in Washington, D.C. Hani was so determined that their only child never be burned that he had devised a home escape plan when Nicolas was an adolescent and made him practice it regularly. Just recently they had talked about sending him an escape ladder to keep in his dorm room, the kind they kept under their own bed.

  “I’ll see you later,” Claudette said as her husband rushed out the door.

  “It could be a long day,” he said.

  Daylight had yet to break when Mansour jumped into his ancient red Jeep Wrangler and began the two-mile trip to the hospital. There was hardly time to think on the five-minute drive, but he reassured himself that he could handle whatever he found there. He had treated burns from Beirut to Baltimore to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and he was confident that he had probably seen worse than what lay ahead of him. As the hospital came into view, he said the prayer he often said on the way to an emergency: “God help us to help them.”

  At Newark International Airport, Christine Simons had scanned her last package on the overnight shift at Federal Express when a friend from the neighborhood called.

  “The radio is reporting a fire at Seton Hall,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” she cried. “Are any of the children hurt?”

  “They’re not saying much on the news,” he said.

  The Simonses’ apartment was less than a mile and two traffic lights from the boundary separating Newark from the leafy suburb of South Orange and the Seton Hall University campus. Shawn could easily have commuted to classes, but Christine had encouraged him to make the most of his college experience by living in the dorm. At first, Shawn had been homesick, but his second semester had started off well and he had adjusted to campus living. Still, he ran home every chance he got, to join his mother shopping or just hang out talking. Christine and Shawn were unusually close.

  Shawn had picked up much from his mother, but Christine considered her optimism to be her greatest gift to her son. Both said things such as, “Everything will be all right,” and “Every day is a good day,” and “God will take care of it.” And they believed it.

  I’m sure the fire is out and Shawn is on his way home right now to tell me the story, Christine said to herself as she drove a little faster than usual out of the airport parking lot.

  But Shawn wasn’t there when Christine got home, and he wasn’t answering his cell phone, so she got back in her car and drove to Seton Hall. When she got close, she saw a cavalcade of emergency vehicles, their flashing red lights bouncing off trees and buildings. A guard at the gatehouse held up his hand.

  Christine stopped the car and rolled down her window.

  “My son lives on campus, and I want to know if any of the children are hurt,” she said.

  “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t let you in. You’ll have to go to police headquarters for information,” the guard said, turning his back on her.

  Christine pulled over to the side of the road, wondering what to do.

  Just then, a fire truck roared up to the guardhouse. Christine jumped out of her car and ran through the gate just as the fire truck passed through. She spri
nted across the grass, up a set of stairs, and down a long sidewalk toward Boland Hall. The closer she got, the more anxious she felt. She passed injured youngsters in pajamas and T-shirts, crying and consoling one another. She searched the sea of faces, looking for Shawn. “At least one is dead,” she overheard a fireman say.

  Someone tapped on her shoulder.

  “Aren’t you Shawn’s mom?” a sobbing girl asked.

  “Yes, baby,” Christine answered, patting the girl’s long, wavy hair.

  “I’m Alvaro’s girl, Angie. Remember me?”

  The two had met two days before. It was the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and Shawn had no classes. “Pick me up, Mom. We need to go shopping,” he had said when he called Christine at home that morning. When she arrived at the dorm, Angie was in the room with Alvaro, and Shawn had introduced them.

  “Of course I remember you,” Christine said.

  “I can’t find Alvaro or Shawn,” Angie cried. “They’re not answering their phones, and no one saw them come out of the building.”

  Christine’s hands tingled and she felt almost woozy. She knew when her blood pressure was rising, and it was racing now. A student was dead — she had heard the fireman say it — and her son was missing.

  Looking skyward, Christine saw smoke pouring from the third-floor windows, the floor where Shawn and Alvaro lived. Shawn, where are you? she wondered, trying to keep herself calm. The thought that something bad had happened to her only son, a boy she worshipped, was not a notion Christine was willing to entertain.

  “Come with me,” she said, leading the crying girl by the hand. “Let’s check the hospital. Maybe they went there to help a friend.” That was exactly the sort of thing her Shawn would have done.

  Hani Mansour parked his Jeep at the curb outside the emergency room and walked quickly inside. It was 5:45 a.m. Normally this was the slowest time of day in the ER, but now it was swarming with wounded kids. Mansour was five feet four inches tall and he tended to be on the plump side, except when one of his endless fad diets happened to be going well. The twinkle in his eye betrayed his mischievous spirit, and he had an infectious, high-pitched laugh. He loved his own practical jokes. But when it came to treating patients, he was all business. And when it came to burn emergencies, there was always a sense of relief when Mansour and his team took over. The emergency room staff was reassured by his presence.

  Mansour looked around and realized the biggest crisis in the burn center’s history was breaking around him.

  Within minutes of Mansour’s arrival in the ER, his staff began filtering downstairs from the burn unit. Theirs was considered by many to be the toughest job in the hospital. It took a special person to treat burn patients. The work was both physically and emotionally draining. A single session in the tank room, cleaning and debriding a patient’s burns, took brute strength and a strong stomach. Long, grueling days, hour after hour of witnessing unspeakable agony and suffering, and too many sad stories to remember were all part of the job. The worst cases were impossible to forget: A couple who had stood by helplessly as all of their children burned up in a house fire. A five-week-old baby whose hands had to be amputated after his father had held them under boiling water to stop him from crying. Sometimes a generous glass of wine or two at the end of a day was the only remedy for the pressure. Sometimes there was no remedy at all.

  The overnight shift had already put in thirteen hours when the call came from the ER, and the morning shift was arriving early, having heard the first news reports. Judging from what he was seeing, Mansour knew that he would need every available member of his team.

  Alvaro Llanos, in trauma room 1, was the most critical patient. Nurses wrapped him in blankets as he babbled incoherently and gasped for breath. At first glance, they hadn’t been able to tell if he was covered in black soot or charred midnight. His arm was so badly burned that just putting in an intravenous line was nearly impossible.

  Alvaro’s airway was clogged with soot, and he was coughing up frothy sputum. In quick order, he was paralyzed with a potent muscle relaxant and sedated with the liquid tranquilizer Versed. An endotracheal tube was pushed through his mouth and down his windpipe to stop his throat from swelling closed, and an IV line was thrust into his groin to deliver a critical saline solution through his veins to keep him from going into burn shock. A second and third IV line carried a steady trickle of morphine and Versed into his bloodstream to dull the deep, relentless pain of his catastrophic burns. The dosage exceeded that which was normally given to dying patients. There was not one moment to spare. One nurse jotted down the boy’s vital signs on a pant leg of her blood-spattered scrubs rather than take the time to start a chart.

  Just a few feet away from his roommate, on the other side of the curtain, Shawn, still conscious, fought for every breath. His lungs, burned and clogged with mucus and soot, were closing fast. In a second, the situation had become desperate. There was no time for sedation. A breathing tube was jammed down Shawn’s throat. Blood spurted out of his mouth: the tube had stabbed his esophagus.

  Shawn began to gag violently. His scorched scalp had pared back from the searing heat; the skin there was peeling off in sheets. Shawn’s eyes were swollen almost completely shut and he didn’t know what was happening to him. Terrified, he thrashed around so wildly that two nurses and two medical residents could not keep him from moving.

  “Norcuron,” Mansour called to one of his nurses.

  While the residents held Shawn down, the nurse jabbed a hypodermic needle into his buttocks. The drug worked like a stun gun. Within seconds, he was still.

  But the drug had done nothing to quiet his fear.

  Chapter 3

  In the waiting room, parents searched frantically for their children. Word had begun to filter out that students had died in the fire and that dozens of others were seriously hurt.

  Sue Manzo, a burn nurse, was assaulted with questions as she made her way through the crowd outside the ER. Dozens of injured students were jammed into the waiting area, and worried-looking adults spilled over onto the sidewalk outside.

  Can you find out if my son is in there?

  My daughter is missing.

  How many children are burned?

  Did any of the students die?

  Can someone please tell us what’s going on?

  Manzo wished she could offer some comfort, but there was no time for talk. When the charge nurse had called her at home, less than an hour earlier, she had told Manzo they were expecting dozens of injured students. Manzo knew that every minute counted. As soon as she had hung up the phone, she had jumped into her clothes, brushed her teeth, pulled her hair back in a ponytail, and then driven at breakneck speed toward the hospital, running every red light she encountered.

  “Someone will be out shortly to update you,” she said, brushing by everyone.

  Passing the nurses’ station, Manzo heard the receptionist on the telephone. “No, sir, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you if your son is here. I don’t have any information yet. You’ll have to call back.” She wondered if it was the same father she had just taken a call from upstairs, in the burn unit, on the way to her locker. The poor man was beside himself with worry. He said he lived more than an hour away and he hadn’t been able to reach his son by phone. All Manzo had been able to tell him was the same thing the receptionist had said: “I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to call back.”

  Bursting through the doors to the triage area, Manzo headed for one of the curtains. A badly burned boy held out his hand, and she grabbed it. “My roommate,” he whimpered. “He was right behind me. You’ve got to tell me he’s okay. Please tell me he’s okay.” The boy opened his other hand. He was clutching a golden cross on a chain. “Please give this to my mother,” he said.

  Manzo had witnessed indescribable horrors during her eight years as a burn nurse. She had cradled burned babies in her arms, rocking them like newborns, until they finally, mercifully, passed away. This was going to be right up there
with the worst, she thought, taking the medal from the boy.

  “I promise I’ll give it to her,” she said.

  “Please don’t leave me,” the boy cried. “I’m so scared. If I die before my mom gets here, will you tell her I love her?”

  “I’m not going anywhere, sweetie,” she said.

  Christine Simons had arrived at the hospital expecting to see her son in the waiting room. On the ride there, she had imagined walking in and seeing Shawn, draped in a sheet, asking to go home. In her daydream, when she called his name, he would run into her arms and reassure her: Everything’s okay, Mom. I’m fine. Really, I am. But all Christine saw when she got there were other people’s injured children and other parents desperate for information. Her ex-husband, Kenny, was among them.

  “Where’s Shawn?” he asked breathlessly, rushing to Christine’s side.

  “We need to find him,” she said.

  The couple had divorced when their son was four, but they were always civil to each other for the sake of Shawn. Kenny had remarried and had other children. He hadn’t kept up with Shawn the way he should have, and their relationship was strained. Now he wondered what he would do without him.

  Kenny had also been working the night shift, at a plastics factory five miles from Seton Hall, when he heard about the fire on a co-worker’s portable radio. He had driven straight to the university, driven right through the open gates, ignoring the waving security guard. “Has anyone seen my son?” he cried as he ran around the parking lot outside Boland Hall, frantically searching for Shawn. “My son’s name is Shawn Simons.” Someone said several students had been taken to Saint Barnabas. Kenny was so distraught by the news, he forgot where he had parked his car. Eventually he located it and raced to the hospital.

  “My son’s name is Shawn Simons,” Christine said when the receptionist looked up from her desk.