Suspect showed no remorse

Marc Lukasiak
Saturday, Jan. 27, 2001 12:00 p.m. | Saturday, Jan. 27, 2001 12:00 p.m.

Firefighter who fell during rescue 'lucky to be alive'

By Ellen James
TRIBUNE-rEVIEW
ejames@tribweb.com

As volunteer firefighter Frank Bagnato tried to save the life of a man trapped in a burning building in Sharpsburg, he nearly lost his own.

Bagnato was at the top of a 35-foot extension ladder, ready to pull a man out of an apartment three stories above Main Street. But the man, apparently overcome by smoke, fell backward into his apartment.

'I had climbed to the top of the ladder and grabbed onto the windowsill,' Bagnato said Friday from his hospital bed. Then the ladder buckled and Bagnato fell to the sidewalk.

'The last thing I saw was the starry sky, and then it was the pavement. It happened so fast,' Bagnato said. Bagnato was rushed to UPMC St. Margaret, near Aspinwall, where he is being treated for two broken vertebra.

Fellow Sharpsburg firefighter Lou Curcio, who was about halfway up the ladder, caught his foot between two rungs and was treated for a sprained ankle.

Bagnato hopes to be released today and join his wife, Elizabeth, and their two sons, Frank, 13, and Joshua, 8. But he said he is not angry at Michael Mullen, 43, who is accused of starting the fire early Thursday after smoking marijuana and inhaling lacquer thinner fumes in his apartment.

Authorities said four people died in the blaze, including the man Bagnato was trying to save.

'It is more sorrow for the people who died because he had to get high. But losing someone on the job, that never gets easy,' Bagnato said, grimacing in pain when he moved too quickly in his bed.

Bagnato said he has enough vacation and sick days to cover the time he will miss from his job as a laborer with the Allegheny County maintenance department. Although they were both county employees, - Mullen was in the Department of Aging - the firefighter did not know Mullen.

Bagnato said he is lucky to be alive.

'I heard that the woman who died fell only one story. I feel very lucky to survive my fall,' he said.

Nancy Ashbaugh, 55, died when she jumped out of her third-floor window trying to escape the smoke and flames. Her body was found on a nearby roof.

Bagnato, a 28-year veteran of the Sharpsburg Volunteer Fire Company, said he thinks the ladder collapsed because the top rungs were improperly latched to the building and came loose.

As Bagnato rested in his hospital bed, he watched news reports of other volunteer firefighters, including his wife, digging through the rubble of the apartment building and searching for bodies.

Elizabeth Bagnato said she was hesitant to come back to the scene while her husband was in the hospital.

'I wanted to be with him, but I knew I had to help out here. We're all doing our job,' she said while taking a break from the cold, tedious digging through the debris.

Frank Bagnato, a lifelong resident of Sharpsburg, said he doubts the injury will stop him from being a firefighter.

'I've always wanted to be firefighter, and I don't think this will stop me. I have always wanted to help people and be a part of the community doing it.'

Staff reporter Elizabeth Barczak contributed to this report.

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Community hit by tragedy - A night of smoking marijuana and inhaling paint thinner fumes by the resident of a Sharpsburg apartment building sparked a fire early Thursday that killed at least two people, injured 10 and forced others to flee for their lives, Allegheny County police said.

The man accused of starting a fire in his Sharpsburg apartment building that left four people dead made no effort to help his neighbors and has shown no remorse, police said Friday.

Michael Albert Mullen, 43, told police he was inhaling fumes from lacquer thinner that investigators believe started the fast-moving fire on Main Street.

One body was found yesterday, and a search continued into the night for another resident who was presumed dead. The bodies of two victims were found Thursday.

Witnesses said Mullen emerged in a daze from the burning building early Thursday as his neighbors leaped to nearby roofs, crawled to safety or collapsed inside.

Asked if Mullen has expressed remorse about the fire, county police Superintendent Kenneth Fulton said: 'I can't say that he has.'

Mullen told police he awoke to the smell of smoke and ran down a hallway banging on doors and yelling 'fire' as he fled the flames, court records state.

But Fulton said that Mullen, a county employee and former Marine, alerted no one in the building's 10 other apartments.

'After he knew the fire was started, he just left the apartment without knocking on any doors,' Fulton said.

A woman's body was pulled from the charred bricks and wood of the three-story building at 5 p.m. yesterday as family members looked on. Allegheny County Fire Marshal Robert Full said one of the victims had a physical disability, but he would not elaborate.

The search was slowed because the mostly collapsed building was unsafe for workers, Full said. 'Right now, they're faced with an unbelievable dangerous environment.'

Ten people, including three firefighters, were injured in the fire.

Mullen is in the Allegheny County Jail without bond. He initially was charged with two counts of homicide and is expected to be charged soon with two more deaths.

The bodies of Nancy Ashbaugh, 55, and an unidentified man were recovered Thursday. Police expected to identify the man's body with help from dental records from West Virginia.

Mullen's explanation of the fire evolved over two interviews with detectives about 12 hours apart on Thursday, according to court records.

'We knew that he had taken some marijuana and inhaled some lacquer thinner. He had a candle burning, and probably a combination of those three ingredients caused this,' Fulton said.

Full said that under the right conditions, lacquer thinner can be as flammable and explosive as a bomb.

Alfred Panza Jr., owner of the apartment building that includes a dentist's office and a telecommunications company on the first floor, said every apartment was equipped with a smoke detector, according to Full.

'We don't have any reason not to believe him at this point,' Full said. The building also had a fire alarm system, although Full said residents he spoke with did not hear an alarm.

There were reports by witnesses that firefighters found at least one smoke alarm in a box inside the building. 'We did hear some of that,' Full said.

Neither Allegheny County nor Sharpsburg require smoke detectors to be installed, but Sharpsburg police Chief Al Dacierno said officials were already looking into establishing such a code.

As workers plucked through the still-smoking skeleton of the building yesterday, witnesses and heroes talked quietly about the fire.

Two Sharpsburg police officers said the fire in the 700 block of Main Street was reported at 12:55 a.m. and they responded within a minute. They found Christopher Moot, who lived across the hall from Mullen, holding the front door open.

Moot called 911 when he heard a bang, looked out of his door and saw flames in Mullen's apartment, according to court records.

Mullen grabbed the lacquer thinner and a paper bag he was huffing from before escaping the blaze, court records say. A can of thinner was found in a parking lot next to the apartment building, Fulton said..

Patrolman Tom Stelitano, 32, said he found Mullen dazed in the front stairwell and yanked him onto the street.

'He was just standing there like he didn't know what to do,' Stelitano said.

An officer at the scene yesterday said police think Mullen might have left his apartment by the building's back stairwell and hidden the paint thinner before re-entering to leave by the front stairs.

Stelitano and Sgt. Rocco Magnelli, the first two officers at the fire, raced through the second floor, using flashlights to guide residents outside.

Stelitano said an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms told them that if they had stayed inside another minute, they would have been hit by a flashback of fire.

As the officers led about eight residents from the building, Mullen sought treatment in an ambulance.

Sharpsburg firefighter Donna Costanzo, who was with Mullen in the ambulance, said he claimed to have hurt his finger knocking on doors.

'He destroyed so many lives, and he came out with a little boo-boo, all because he wanted to get high,' she said.

Sharpsburg residents wondered about Mullen as they watched police, firefighters and demolition experts use a hydraulic clam bucket and hand tools to dismantle the building yesterday evening to make it safe for the search.

Most of them said they did not know Mullen, a native of New Eagle in Washington County. He had lived alone in the apartment building for seven months and worked as a case manager in the county Department of Aging, police said.

The Duquesne University graduate is estranged from his wife, Hitomi Mullen, and they have one child, police said.

Reached at his Spring Hill home yesterday, Mullen's brother, David, 42, said he was stunned that his brother had been arrested. He said he did 'not necessarily believe' his brother was doing drugs or that he had started the fire.

Michael Mullen was employed by the county Children Youth Services from 1988-98. He is a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard in New Castle, Lawrence County.

A coroner's inquest has been scheduled for noon on Feb. 8.

Marc Lukasiak can be reached at mlukasiak@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7939. Staff writers David Conti and Elizabeth Barczak contributed to this report.

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