Another Agenda: The Politics of Fire Safety in Ramapo, New York – Transcript

By Sasha Linden Cohen

JANNA MCPARTLAND: Next up, we’ll hear about one firefighter’s story in Spring Valley, a small suburban village where the housing is chock full of safety issues. What happens when the safety issues become deadly? Sasha Linden Cohen has the story.

SASHA LINDEN COHEN: Jared Lloyd was a firefighter in Rockland County, a small county about 20 miles north of Manhattan.

Tim Hill: I mean // He lived for the firehouse. And just helping people.

Sabrail Davenport: I’m a single parent, so it was just me and him. He’s a sweetheart. Very kind. Social. And he had an infectious smile.

Corey: He always lit up the room when you walked in or he walked in.

Tim Hill: I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just, it was his demeanor. He always had a smile on his face.

Sasha: Everyone I encountered, who knew Jared, said he was special—the kind of person that people relied on. On March 23 of 2021, just before 1am, Jared and his team rushed to the scene of the Evergreen Apartment fire in Spring Valley, NY. He was one of the first five to arrive, and it was gruesome.

[NEWS MONTAGE]

CBS TV report: Flames quickly spread through Evergreen Court Home for Adults around 1 a.m. Tuesday

ABC7 TV report: We begin with that fatal fire at the assisted living facility—it is still not under control

CBS TV report: And one of the firefighters who ran into this burning building is missing…

Sasha: Jared was 35 years old, a father of two young boys, and had been a volunteer firefighter for 16 years in the village of Spring Valley. All but one of the facility’s 118 residents survived—Oliver Heuston was pulled from the building but he died later that night in the hospital. But Jared never made it that far. Soon after he made a mayday call, the building collapsed on him.

Sasha: Sabrail Davenport, Jared’s mom, feels more than just grief following the loss of her son. She feels anger. Because she says it was preventable, a consequence of something that has been happening in Spring Valley for a long time.

Sabrail: It was a tragedy. I lost my only child. My only child. Unexpectedly…… because of someone’s recklessness, recklessness. And it didn’t have to happen.

Sasha: Before I go on, I want to be clear and say that this is not exactly a story about Jared. Of course, through the process of reporting I’ve gotten to learn about him and the kind of person he was—that he loved being a father; that he gave his all to the firehouse. But this is a story about his untimely death, and the circumstances surrounding it. Because those events reveal a lot about the fraught social and political landscape of Rockland County.

Sasha: I started reporting on the town of Ramapo when I was in college, back in 2019. I wanted to write about the dynamic between its large orthodox and hasidic jewish community, and the rest of the population, which is made up of several immigrant communities and a longstanding black community—so, the vast majority of non-jewish residents are people of color.

Sasha: When I started this project almost 5 years ago now, I was focused on the public school system, which was once top notch, and now has basically been in a funding crisis for a decade and a half. But as I started talking to people, I realized that the struggling school district was part of a larger puzzle: there was also a dangerous problem of overcrowding, unsafe housing and unchecked development. The village wasn’t enforcing building and fire codes, people were ringing alarm bells, and no one seemed to care. And this lack of enforcement, I was told, was driven by the county’s Orthodox and Hasidic jewish community—in other words, the bloc vote.

Sasha: I know this is a very, uh, basic question // what is the block?

Justin Schwartz: Ah, that’s easy.

Sasha: This is Justin Schwartz, an Orthodox jewish housing activist and former firefighter.

Justin: Block in, in politics is a group of people voting for the same person without giving thought because someone says, vote. So in the, uh, Jewish world, particularly in the Hasidic world, the Grand Rabbi says, we vote this person, they all vote. That’s the block.

Sasha: In the town of Ramapo, the religious bloc holds a lot of power. When I heard about Jared’s death, a chill went down my spine, and I remembered the first time I met Justin, almost five years ago now. It was just after a meeting, so the audio quality isn’t great.

Justin: My phrase is, nothing is going to get done until we bring out body bags. // We’re very lucky and fortunate that nobody has really gotten killed. // I’m trying to be proactive instead of reactive, but nobody is listening. Nobody’s listening.

Sasha: This was in 2019. Justin knew—he told me—that people were going to die because of building and code enforcement issues. That it wasn’t a matter of if, but when. Justin first became aware of some of the building issues in the town because he was a firefighter. Back in 2011, he responded to a call at the former Spring Valley high school, which was being converted into a yeshiva, or Jewish School. A hasidic developer had his men doing work on the mezzanine, which caved in. Two workers were trapped under the rubble. When Justin arrived, the scene was mayhem.

Justin: The contractors were pulling out their equipment—I didn’t understand why they were pulling it out and leaving the scene. I didn’t understand why nobody wanted to tell me what happened. It turns out that they didn’t have a permit to what was done. You didn’t have licensed contractors. And two people went to the hospital. I was outraged.

Sasha: So, he began attending planning and zoning board meetings, and speaking out at other public forums about what he’d seen. He also joined the illegal housing task force, a grassroots group dedicated to curbing illegal housing and building.

Justin: So what have we found? We found construction that’s not up to code.

It’s all about the developers and how many people they can push in. The infrastructure can’t take it. And yet, we’re still building.

Sasha: He eventually went on to chair the task force, despite receiving a lot of harassment from leaders in the Jewish community.

Justin: The main focus of me becoming on the task force is there was no religious Jewish person on the task force. They cannot say we’re anti Semitic // that is not the point of this task force. I want to do the safety of our firefighters, first responders, the residents, and the children.

Sasha: All these clips are from 2019, on that first day I met Justin. State Senator James Skoufis had just released a report on code enforcement in New York State, with an entire chapter dedicated to Ramapo. It confirmed all the things that Justin and other activists had been talking about for years—illegal subdivisions, where upwards of 20 people are stuffed into single family homes, unlicensed contractors, lack of permitting and enforcement. But in a broad sense, it outlined a culture of compliance, where people weren’t really facing consequences for allowing unsafe conditions. Or if they did face consequences, they were meager, and it was treated like the cost of doing business. It was a damning report, but not very surprising to any of the people who had been paying attention. And not all that much has changed since it came out, despite peoples’ hopes.

Justin: It’s worse. In fact, it got worse.// Because it was all bullshit. It was all, all show.

Sasha: Flash forward to Justin, just a couple months ago. 2024.

Justin: Once Jared Lloyd died, I felt personally responsible for that. Because I could have prevented it. Nobody listened and I resigned.

Sasha: The evergreen fire began, undetected, around 9pm, when a father/son duo went into the building for a ritual passover cleansing. Rabbis Nathaniel and Aaron Sommer used an industrial grade blowtorch on an oven to kosherize the kitchen for passover. The alarms were turned off to prevent a false call, and then, they left, moving onto the next building they were hired to cleanse. Because the alarms were off, the fire was raging, spreading inside the walls of the apartment for hours before the fire department was called.

Sasha: Frank Youngman was the fire chief at the time, and he told me when they got to the fire just before 1 a.m. the water pressure was really bad.

Frank Youngman: It was like pissing out of the hydrant.

Sasha: With all the overcrowding, there’s a lot more people living in Spring Valley than the infrastructure was designed for.

Frank: We went to Main Street and it took a while for us to get to Main Street and then get the water. It took like 20 minutes. And until we did that, we really couldn’t do nothing Meanwhile, the fire was goin’. It was gone.

Sasha: Frank resigned as fire chief a couple weeks after Jared’s death, although he still drives for the department. And this past January he resigned from his position as a part time fire inspector for the village. He says they were chronically understaffed, and that it seemed like no one in the village government really wanted to fix it. In the years since Jared’s death, it was hard for him to keep doing the right thing when he faced so much resistance.

Frank: I think that the trustees are afraid that we’re going to write up their buddies and they’re going to get in trouble.

Sasha: And so he wrote a letter to the mayor, detailing his frustrations.

Frank: I’m tired of trying to do the right thing here. Resignation to take effect Jan 31, 2024.

Sasha: Back in 2021, a few months after the Evergreen fire, the county’s District Attorney, iTom iWalsh, launched criminal cases against six people—all but two of them were dismissed. Rabbis Nathaniel and Aaron Sommer, the ones who had gone in that night with a blowtorch, were charged with two counts of second degree manslaughter, second- and third-degree assault, fourth-degree arson, and second-degree reckless endangerment.

Sasha: They pled not guilty on all charges.

[Entering hotel, meeting Sabrail]

Sasha: I met Jared’s mom back in March. She lives in Maryland now, but she’d come back for the anniversary to see her grandchildren and visit the gravesite. We went up to her hotel room, where she told me about Jared and about the case.

Sabrail: We were brought into, um, the District Attorney’s office. We were brought into the Mayor’s office. Everybody said the same thing. He was going to make sure that there was some indictment and that they would be brought to trial.

Sasha: As the District Attorney began prosecuting, firefighters turned to social media and to the press, to voice their frustrations: just a month after the fire, Spring Valley firefighter Aaron Lerer wrote on his facebook page, quote “We said it every time we walked into this place. ‘One of us is going to die if there is a fire here.’ We said it and we believed it, we knew it. Everyone in the department knew it, the village knew it, the inspectors knew it. Now we get cheap words, pats on the back, platitudes and the promise of an ‘investigation.'”

It happened over the course of a few months, that Sabrail began to feel like the DA’s office didn’t really mean what they had said. That they never intended to seek meaningful punishment for the defendants.

Sasha: This was a major fire. These two people died. Wouldn’t you want a conviction? So I’m like what do we have here? And I’m sorry to call them puppets but are they puppets?

Sasha: In the summer of 2023, Sabrail found out the DA,iTom iWalsh, was working out a plea deal.

Sabrail: We wanted to go to trial. They kept saying, Oh, we don’t think they’re going to win through trial. Why not? Oh, they’re going to have their culture and we’re going to have ours or whatever. It’ll be a hung jury. Let’s take that chance! But don’t just, you know, settle for nothing. A plea deal, which we did not want.

Sasha: Sabrail, and others, don’t think that justice was not the goal in this case, that iTom iWalsh never really wanted to hold people to account.

Sabrail: Those people, the defendants, pleaded…not guilty, for two and a half years.

Two and a half years. So now all of a sudden, on September 20th of last year, you pleading guilty? Because you were told that, oh, plead guilty, and we’ll make sure you don’t go to jail….There had to be another agenda

Sasha: It’s not an unusual thing for criminal cases to be settled through plea bargains, but something about the whole thing seemed off to her, like it was predetermined.

Sabrail: It was so many times I went off on them. That I had Ryan, which was the female assistant district attorney, crying. And I felt that she was crying because she knew that this was wrong. You know what I mean? That’s where that word puppet comes in. I think she knew that it shouldn’t go down like this. But she couldn’t say it when you’re working for a district attorney’s office.

Sasha: Because the district attorneys are elected?

Sabrail: Yes, Yes.

Sasha : And the voting power is…

Sabrail: Their culture. Their hasidics.

Sasha: There had to be another agenda. That’s what Sabrail said earlier. And that’s what a lot of people are saying about the outcome of this case. Because iTomi Walsh? The District Attorney? Well, he was voted into office with the support of the bloc. A strong turnout from the hasidic community won him the seat by a wide margin.

Sabrail: So that was a betrayal for me. That was a betrayal for me. I have no respect for that district attorney’s office in Rockland County. None.

Sasha: When I reached out to the DA’s office, they referred to several reports describing the case and its findings. But they wouldn’t comment on the specifics of Sabrail’s comments, or on the allegations that the outcome of this case was politically motivated. In the end, Nathaniel Sommer, the father, got 5 years probation, while Daniel, the son, got three years. And, they had to pay a fine.

Sabrail: $625 Fine.

Sasha: I’m sorry. How much?

Sabrail: $625. For my son’s life. That’s all he’s worth. Him and Mr. Hueston. That’s all they worth.

Sasha: Jared’s case is in many ways atypical—the town’s ongoing safety issues, for the most part, can’t be traced to industrial blowtorches or passover rituals. But the outcome of this case is highly typical. The fact that no one, including the owner of the ramshackle building, suffered any major consequences for what happened that night, was hardly surprising to anyone familiar with the local politics. It’s hard to shake Justin’s words, words, words he’s been saying for years now: No one is going to do anything until they bring out the body bags. Now, there are body bags. But the question remains: is anyone going to do anything?