After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival

by Robin Gaby Fisher

  Paula had given the question plenty of thought. Alvaro hadn’t been the first to ask.

  Her own mother had pulled her aside one day. “What are your intentions with this boy?” she had asked. “Don’t play with his heart, Paula. He’s a nice boy and he’s been through enough.”

  After that, her older brother put in his two cents, saying, “You don’t want to hurt this kid, do you? You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. You can’t handle this.”

  “I think I can,” she told him.

  “I know I can,” Paula told Alvaro, now that he was the one who was asking. “I look past the burns and see the person,” she told him.

  They had made love after that. Alvaro told Paula, “I want to keep my shirt on.” So Paula kept hers on as well. The first time was awkward, painfully so. Alvaro was disappointed. Paula comforted him. Don’t worry. It will get better. It’ll be okay.

  Days passed. They made love again. It was better. After that, they took it slowly.

  Paula asked permission to explore his body underneath his clothes. He unbuttoned part of his shirt and she touched his chest and his arms.

  “I love your arms,” she said. “They’re so soft.”

  Each time, he trusted her a little more.

  “I want to see how your skin feels against mine,” Paula said one night when they were together in Alvaro’s bed.

  Alvaro felt his heart beat wildly. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said soothingly. “It’ll be all right.”

  Slowly he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it away from his scarred chest. He unzipped the special vest that exerted pressure on his burned skin. He was naked, and trembling.

  Tears filled Paula’s eyes. She pulled him close to her.

  “You’re beautiful,” she whispered.

  The telephone call came from a detective in the Essex County prosecutor’s office on the evening of Tuesday, June 10, 2003. The sound of a gruff voice surprised Shawn. He had been expecting to hear from his new girlfriend, a pretty girl named Chinaire, whom he had known casually in high school and recently met up with again at a club in Newark. Sparks flew after he asked her to dance, and they had been spending a lot of time together. They had a date planned and she was supposed to call to tell him what movie she wanted to see.

  Instead he was listening to a detective telling him that arrests in the Seton Hall fire were imminent. It had been 1,238 days since the fire. This was a courtesy call, the detective said. “We didn’t want you to be caught off guard.”

  “What about Alvaro?” Shawn asked. “Does he know?”

  “We’re trying to reach Alvaro, too,” the detective said.

  Shawn didn’t sleep much that night. Every time he looked at the clock, it was only a few minutes later. After more than three years, he thought he had put the fire behind him. At least that’s what he told himself and everyone else. But after the phone call from the detective, awful memories he’d locked deep within began to wash over him like a tidal wave, and he hadn’t been able to catch his breath. He had tried calling Alvaro but hadn’t gotten an answer. He hoped his old roommate knew the news.

  Lying there, all alone in his bed, Shawn wondered if it would have been better if no one had been caught. That way, he would have gone on pretending it didn’t matter much who set the fire. Somehow, without a name and a face to focus on, it had been easier not to blame anyone, to think it was just a terrible accident and no one was really responsible. Tomorrow he would have both a name and a face, and he wasn’t sure how he would feel.

  The arrests of Joey LePore and Sean Ryan the following day made headlines around the country. Ryan was picked up as he was leaving a tanning salon near his home. LePore was pulled over in his car near his home in Florham Park.

  The cops showed more emotion than the suspects as they led the pair, handcuffed and shackled, with their heads bowed, into the county jail at about six that night. John Frucci had tears of relief in his eyes as he escorted them from the unmarked police car to the jail. It had been a long, hard investigation. The suspects had stonewalled law enforcement officials every step of the way, and Frucci had often thought there might never be an arrest in the case.

  The Newark Star-Ledger reported that a special grand jury had been meeting behind closed doors in the Essex County Courthouse in Newark every Thursday for a year and a half. They had heard testimony from hundreds of witnesses, including students, firefighters, and arson investigators, and pored over more than six thousand pages of statements and exhibits. By the time the proceedings were finally over, one of the grand jurors had died and several others had been excused because of illness or work problems.

  What the grand jury heard over those long months was that Ryan and LePore had had a reputation in Boland Hall. One of the students had dubbed them Beavis and Butt-Head. On the night of the fire, after the biggest basketball game on Seton Hall’s schedule, a freshman girl and her roommate threw a party in their room on the third floor in Boland Hall, on the other side of the building from Shawn and Alvaro’s room. Ryan and LePore attended the party. It was raucous and spilled over into the third-floor lounge. A few of the boys were roughhousing, and a playful wrestling match broke out between Ryan and one of his fraternity brothers. A resident adviser named Dan Nugent, who had had previous run-ins with Ryan and LePore, threw everyone out of the lounge at around four in the morning, thirty minutes before the fire.

  LePore and Ryan’s next-door neighbor in Boland Hall was John Giunta. Giunta’s roommate testified that after the commotion in the lounge quieted down, he heard two sets of footsteps running into and then out of Ryan and LePore’s room. The next thing he heard was the fire alarm wailing.

  The case against LePore and Ryan was far from ironclad. But what had turned it from hopeless to possible for prosecutors was testimony from a reluctant witness named Michael Karpenski. Karpenski, a childhood friend, had partied with Ryan and LePore in Boland Hall in the hours before the fire. In early interviews with investigators, he had admitted being in the dorm that night but said he knew nothing about how the fire started, or who set it.

  After testifying before the grand jury, however, Karpenski contacted investigators to say he had forgotten to tell them something. That “something” turned out to be the closest thing prosecutors had to clear evidence of guilt.

  At a meeting at the prosecutor’s office, Karpenski recalled that two days after the fire, he was summoned to the Dunkin’ Donuts in Madison by Ryan, LePore, and Tino Cataldo, another friend who was with them in Boland Hall on the night of the fire. The boy told police investigators that the four friends had made a pact in the Dunkin’ Donuts on that Friday afternoon in January of 2000. Karpenski said they vowed they would not tell police anything about what was going on in the third-floor lounge before the fire.

  Surveillance tape from an all-night fast-food restaurant confirmed that Karpenski and Cataldo had left the dorm at least an hour before the fire started. Even though Karpenski wasn’t in the lounge when the match was struck, investigators believed he knew what happened there after he left.

  Karpenski was brought back to the grand jury, where he testified about the secret meeting. Prosecutors still couldn’t prove Ryan and LePore lit the banner, but they felt the clandestine meeting raised the question: if Ryan and LePore had nothing to hide, why call a meeting about the fire?

  The grand jury obviously agreed.

  Ryan and LePore were charged with arson, aggravated assault, reckless manslaughter, and felony murder. The felony murder charge carried a minimum sentence of thirty years in prison. Bail was set at $2 million each. At the bail hearing, LePore turned to the news cameras and smirked.

  Separate indictments accused LePore’s parents and sister of covering up his role in the fire. The indictments revealed that the listening devices detectives had concealed in the LePores’ kitchen had picked up at least nine conversations about the fire. During one of those talks, LePore’s father discu
ssed the possibility of taking the family out of the country rather than risking the chance that Joey might be charged. The next day, Maria LePore had urged her husband and children to lie to investigators and “stay united.” No one was going to hurt her boy.

  The detective who called Shawn had not been able to reach Alvaro to warn him of the arrests. Instead, the next day, as he was driving to a store to buy a stereo, he got the news from a friend who called him on his cell phone.

  “I’m going to have to stop now to take this all in,” he said, pulling his new black Acura with black tinted windows to the side of the busy highway.

  A photograph in the next day’s newspaper showed Ryan and LePore being led to jail. Shawn sat alone at his kitchen table and studied the picture. He recognized the boys as the students who had lived right across the hall.

  Chapter 29

  Shawn graduated from Seton Hall on May 10, 2004, with a degree in business management. He was among more than two thousand graduates at the commencement ceremony at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford. Sitting in the arena, under a huge net of blue and white balloons, with his parents, his sister, Nicole, and his girlfriend, Chinaire, looking on, he thought about how far he had come since the fire. He thought about the dedication of his mother, whose optimism and determination had left him no choice but to reclaim his life. He thought about his three classmates who had died in the fire, who never got a chance to fulfill their dreams. He thought about Alvaro. I wish he was here, sitting right next to me in his cap and gown.

  Alvaro would have been there if he could. But he was lying in a hospital bed at Saint Barnabas, recovering from another skin graft surgery, this time on his neck. It was his twenty-third birthday, but he wasn’t thinking about birthday cake or gifts. He was thinking about Shawn. What better way to celebrate than to think about his former roommate finally reaching his dream?

  “I’m so happy for Shawn,” Alvaro told a friend who was visiting. “I wish I was there with him. But he’s finishing and I’m starting. I’ll get there, too.”

  Alvaro had his own good news to share. A day earlier, in his hospital room at Saint Barnabas, he had gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage to Paula. Her answer was, “Of course!” Hani Mansour had been the first person on the staff to congratulate them. “A wedding!” he had exclaimed. “Look how far you’ve come, Alvaro! When will we see children?” Alvaro and Paula had often talked of having a big family someday, but Paula found herself pregnant sooner than they had planned. Many of her friends had children born out of wedlock, but Paula was determined to be married when she gave birth. “Marriage is important to me,” she had told Alvaro. “I want to be married when our child is born.” Alvaro was happy to oblige her.

  A month after the engagement, on June 26, 2004, Paula and Alvaro married in a small ceremony at Paterson City Hall. Paula wore a pretty white pants suit with pink flowers that Daisy had bought for her. Alvaro dressed in a black shirt and khaki-colored trousers. Only their families attended. The ceremony was simple but emotional.

  “Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” the judge asked Paula.

  “I do,” she answered, fighting back tears.

  “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?” he asked Alvaro.

  Alvaro grinned from ear to ear. He had never been so absolutely sure of anything before in his life.

  “I do,” he said softly, looking into Paula’s eyes. “I do.”

  Five months later, at 11:47 p.m. on November 28, 2004, Ariana Izabella Llanos was born at Saint Barnabas. Everyone in the burn unit cheered when word filtered upstairs. Paula had gone into labor while making bows for the family Christmas tree. She sang all the way to the hospital. The birth was fast and relatively easy. Alvaro videotaped the whole thing. The waiting room outside the maternity unit was overrun with Llanos and Vasquez family members.

  Waiting for her granddaughter to be born, Daisy couldn’t help remembering those somber days in the burn unit. Those nights wondering if she would ever get to touch her son again, ever get to hear him say he loved her. Even after Alvaro was out of danger, she and her husband had been consumed by worry that Alvaro would never find love, never have children, never enjoy the simplicity of a normal life again.

  Then he had found Paula, and everything had changed.

  “¡Gloria a Dios, hay razón para ser feliz otra vez!” Daisy prayed that night.

  Glory to God. There is reason to be happy again.

  Alvaro shut himself in his bedroom and began writing.

  These seven years have been hard for my family and me; this tragedy has given me many obstacles to overcome. I will always remember the day of the fire, waking up to alarms and smoke, trying to find a way out of the building, fearing for my life. I’m reminded every morning of this when I look at my face in the mirror. My body is covered with scars . . .

  A few weeks earlier, just before opening arguments in their arson and felony murder trial were about to begin, Joseph LePore and Sean Ryan had struck a plea deal with prosecutors. After three years of being free on bail, they had exhausted all their appeals. Rather than leave their fate in the hands of a jury and risk spending the better part of their lives behind bars, they would admit to setting the dormitory fire in exchange for five-year jail terms and a chance at parole after sixteen months. For their part, the prosecutors had feared the case against LePore and Ryan might not hold up at trial and they would walk away free. The plea deal brought about an abrupt end to a case that had seemed destined for a long, dramatic trial.

  Sipping tea in the kitchen of the burn ICU, Hani Mansour had read the headline and thought back to the worst day in the burn unit’s history. He looked up from his newspaper and into room 4. It didn’t seem that long ago that Alvaro had lain there, fighting for his life. Now the bed was empty.

  The next day, Friday, January 26, 2007, LePore and Ryan would be sentenced, and Alvaro would get his chance to ask why.

  Why did you set the lounge on fire? Why did you run out of the building without warning all of us? Why did you lie and deceive everyone for all those years, living your lives, going to college, kissing your girlfriends, celebrating Christmas and birthdays with your families, instead of admitting that you had done something stupid, so tragically stupid? Instead of saying you were sorry. So very sorry.

  Shawn had decided not to attend the sentencing. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be in the same room with LePore and Ryan. He was feeling some anger and didn’t know how he would handle it.

  “I’m not going,” he told Alvaro on the phone that night. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  So it would be up to Alvaro to speak. This would be the last big step of the most painful journey of their lives, and he would take it for both of them. He would do it for himself, and he would do it for Shawn — Shawn, who had been there for him at every turn. When he woke up from his long coma. When he looked in the mirror for the first time. When things ended with Angie. His former roommate had become a cherished friend.

  As Alvaro tried to put his thoughts on paper, his heavily scarred hands still shook from the exertion. But he would not be deterred. He wanted those two boys to know the damage they had done, how much heartache they had caused for him and for Shawn and for the dead boys, too — for all the people whose lives were forever changed by Ryan and LePore’s one stupid act.

  It saddens me to hear what my family had to go through, seeing me in a coma for so long, not knowing if I would be alive when they got there the next morning. When I finally did wake up, I couldn’t speak or walk. I was connected to machines. It was scary for me. I had so many ups and downs. To this day I have times when I don’t want to step out the door, when I feel trapped in my own skin.

  Two hours later, Alvaro emerged from his room with a single sheet of paper that reflected seven years of suffering.

  To this day I have times when I don’t want to step out the door, when I feel trapped in my own skin.

  After a sleepless ni
ght, Alvaro and his family drove to the courthouse in Newark in silence. Alvaro trembled during the whole forty-minute ride. Paula draped her arm protectively over his shoulder as they huddled together in the backseat. Alvaro’s heart raced wildly and he felt as though he might be sick.

  The ninth floor of the Essex County courthouse swarmed with news crews volleying for the best seats in the small courtroom where the formal plea proceeding would take place. The left side of the room was reserved for victims; the right side, for supporters of the defendants. It was standing room only in the sweltering courtroom, and the tension was thick as people jostled for a spot. Alvaro sat toward the front of the courtroom, near the parents of the boys who died. They all hugged him. A moment before the proceedings were about to begin, LePore and Ryan walked through the overflow crowd in the hall and into the courtroom. LePore stopped to kiss his girlfriend on the way. Both men turned to greet family members and friends with hearty hellos and wide smiles. Alvaro looked at them and suddenly felt sicker. How can they be smiling? What is wrong with them? Don’t they know the parents of the dead boys are here?

  Judge Harold Fullilove called the court to order. The room fell still. Frank Caltabilota Sr., whose son died in the fire, was the first of fourteen victims to speak. “Mr. LePore and Mr. Ryan, I have waited exactly seven years and one week to tell you both what I think of you and how your stupid prank that got out of hand has affected myself and my family.”

  Under the plea agreement, the prosecutors had agreed to drop the most serious charge — that of felony murder. LePore and Ryan agreed to plead guilty to arson and witness tampering. By accepting the plea, they were spared the minimum thirty-year prison term they would have gotten had they gone to trial and been convicted of murder. The prosecutors also dropped the obstruction of justice charges against LePore’s family. The five-year sentence was a joke, Frank Caltabilota said, echoing the feelings of most of the victims. Their true punishment would come later, he said. “That sentence, Mr. LePore and Mr. Ryan, will be that both of you rot in hell.” The defendants’ families and friends were expressionless, completely dry eyed.