PORTLAND, Maine — The landlord charged with manslaughter in the state’s deadliest fire in decades knew that there was no second exit on the third floor of his building, so he gave residents rope ladders in case they needed to escape, a prosecutor said Monday morning.
But the windows in the upper bedrooms were too small to climb out of, and three people were trapped and died during the Halloween 2014 blaze, Assistant Attorney General John Alsop said.
“All three occupants of the third floor could and would have escaped the fire if indeed there was a means of escape,” he said.
Superior Court Justice Thomas Warren heard opening arguments Monday morning in the trial of Gregory Nisbet, who could be the first landlord in Maine convicted for the deaths of tenants for failing to keep a property up to code. Six young adults died in a November 2014 apartment fire at his property on Noyes Street.
Nisbet pleaded not guilty to six counts of manslaughter and opted for a bench trial rather than trial by jury. One charge of manslaughter is punishable by up to 30 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.
Nearly two years later, the deadly fire’s impact was still visible in the tears of friends and family of the deceased who gathered in the courtroom.
And the case also could be significant for landlords across the state. If Nisbet is convicted, it would set new precedent under state law of a landlord being held liable in case of fire. Two other fire cases were brought against landlords in the last 25 years in Maine, but neither resulted in a conviction, the Portland Press Herald reported.
The landlord is responsible for the six deaths because his building was unsafe and he neglected to maintain it, Alsop said.
“His conduct was the legal cause of the deaths — not the fire, but his conduct,” Alsop said in court.
Investigators found that the tenants had disabled the smoke detectors in the three-story building, that the rear, second-story stairwell was blocked by furniture and that the third-floor bedrooms did not have a secondary exit, as fire code requires. The fire was kindled when a stray cigarette butt ignited a chair and couch on the front porch of the building, investigators found.
The prosecutor argued that Nisbet is criminally responsible for not keeping building up to housing code, and that he should not have been renting out rooms on the third floor at all.
At issue in the case is whether the building at 20-24 Noyes St., since razed, was being used as a duplex or as a boarding house, as landlords have different obligations depending on the use of the building.
Sketching out a defense based on the type of dwelling and manner in which the six residents died, one of Nisbet’s lawyers said that the unrelated residents of the Noyes Street building could be considered a single family under city ordinance. One tenant served as a sort of head of household, gathering rent from the other renters to be paid each month to Nisbet, and there was a similar arrangement for utilities, lawyer Matthew Nichols said.
Those killed were David Bragdon, 27, Ashley Thomas, 29, and Nicole Finlay, 26, who lived in the building, and visitors Steven Summers, 29, of Rockland, Maelisha Jackson, 23, of Topsham and Chris Conlee, 25, of Portland.
Five of the victims of the Halloween fire died inside the building, while Summers died of burns in a hospital two days later. A medical examiner found the cause of death for the five to be inhalation of smoke and fumes from the fire. Three other residents survived the fire after jumping from the second story because the stairway was blocked by furniture.
But Nichols said in his opening argument that the fatal chemical could have been carbon monoxide or the faster killing “hydrogen cyanide,” which also is found in smoke. The lawyer seemed to suggest that the victims were brain dead before they were clinically dead and that this may have affected their ability to escape the fire.
Discussions of a plea deal in the case broke down last year. Nisbet likely opted for a bench trial rather than trial by jury in part because of the complexity of the case and his defense. The criminal trial is expected to take a week.
Five of six of the families of the deceased also have filed suit against Nisbet.