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WTAE
September 4, 2015
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided against hearing an appeal of a lower court’s decision to grant a new trial to a man in the deaths of three Pittsburgh firefighters two decades ago.
The commonwealth’s highest court on Monday said it would not review the case of Gregory Brown Jr., 38, who was sentenced to three life terms in the February 1995 fire on Bricelyn Street in Homewood.
Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. immediately vowed to retry the case. Defense attorney David Fawcett said he and his client were “very relieved and very grateful.”
“It means he’s going to have a chance, after all these years, to prove his innocence,” Fawcett said. He said he and Brown were “very sensitive” to the families of the firefighters who lost their lives, but said his client was “an innocent man who has spent all of his adult life in the jail for a crime he did not commit.”
Last year, a judge ordered a new trial, saying prosecutors hadn’t revealed that two witnesses in the case were promised reward money. Two Superior Court judges upheld that ruling in March, citing “repeated denials” that a reward had been paid; a third judge dissented, saying the issue of reward money was common knowledge.
Prosecutors alleged that Brown poured a half-gallon of gasoline on some clothes in the basement of the four-story home in hopes of collecting $20,000 in insurance money for a down payment on a new home.
Authorities said Capt. Thomas Brooks, 42, Marc Kolenda, 27, and Patricia Conroy, 43, suffocated when their air tanks ran out as they tried to grope their ways out of the rapidly burning home.
