Firefighter's widow calls case dismissal an 'insult'

"She let them go!"

Jeanette Meyran of St. James shouted those words in State Supreme Court in the Bronx Tuesday as it slowly dawned on her that Justice Margaret Clancy had just dismissed guilty verdicts in the Black Sunday fire trial.

Her husband, FDNY Lt. Curtis Meyran, 46, died five years ago after he jumped from the fourth floor of a Bronx apartment building trying to escape the blaze. Prosecutors said walls illegally built by tenants made it difficult for him and other firefighters to get out of the building.

Tears welled in Jeanette Meyran's eyes, and outside the courtroom she railed against Clancy's decision to throw out the guilty verdicts of criminally negligent homicide against the owner and manager of the building for lack of evidence.

"The way she saw it, no one is responsible," Meyran said. "The whole thing is an insult. These people have to live with themselves."

Eileen Bellew, the widow of firefighter John Bellew, was not available for comment.

Defense attorneys had argued that prosecutors never proved that the owner and manager of the building in the Tremont section knew that tenants had built the illegal walls that confused firefighters when they tried to escape the Jan. 23, 2005, blaze.

Meyran left the courthouse and drove to Ladder Company 27, where her husband worked in a firehouse that sits under the Cross Bronx Expressway. Meyran went there seeking the comfort of firefighters who had known her husband.

Inside, amid racks of firefighting gear, a picture of Curtis Meyran rested against a wall, and the firehouse roster for the day he died was on display. Meyran, wearing her husband's black firefighter jacket and a silver heart-shaped locket with his picture inside, continued to express shock at Clancy's decision.

Meyran criticized Clancy's opening statements in which she praised all firefighters as cherished members of the community. "That was a lefthanded compliment," she said.

Meyran, a mother of three, said she accepts that her husband is gone but spends every day trying to pretend that he isn't. "If I don't stay in a state of denial, I can't get through the day," she said.