Owners of Detroit’s burning ‘firefighter selfie’ house are ‘furious’
The owners of the burning, two-story Detroit house where grinning firefighters took a widely-panned selfie on New Year’s Eve are “furious” over the viral image.
“Everybody is furious,” Deonte Higginbotham, 21, told The Post of the brick home that’s been in his family for 50 years.
“They just let it burn to the ground … Eighteen men and none of them did anything,” he added of the firefighters in the tasteless selfie. “All of them need to be fired.”
After the group snap lit up the internet, red-faced fire officials argued that the home was “vacant” and too engulfed in flames for the smoke eaters to save.
“The chief in the middle of the picture there was retiring, and I think they just felt they would do this as a memento, but unfortunately, that’s probably not very professional,” Deputy Fire Commissioner Dave Fornell told The Post.
“It was a fire in a vacant building … The fire was pretty involved, we were not going to go into the building. What we would do is keep the fire from spreading” to other structures, he said.
Google Maps images show that the houses next door and across the street from the Higginbotham’s brick two-story do appear vacant and abandoned.
But Google Maps images and public records show the Higginbotham’s home at the corner of Green and Gould streets was indeed owned and well-cared for before the fire struck.
In fact, the only reason Higginbotham and his mother, Dorothy, weren’t there on New Year’s Eve was that the family had been renovating the house, he said.
Higginbotham still lived there with Dorothy, 70 — who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, he said.
“I’ve lived in it my whole life,” growing up there with two older brothers and an older sister, Higginbotham said.
“She’s really sick right now,” he said of his mother. “We were trying to get the house remodeled” to accommodate her illness, he said. “She’s staying with family” elsewhere in Detroit, he added.
“She doesn’t know about the fire,” he said. “I don’t even want to tell her.”
Neighbors told him that the firefighters barely bothered to hit the house with water, Higginbotham said.
Meanwhile, the FDNY’s own smoke eaters said Thursday that the vulgar photo would never be taken in the Big Apple.
“Wow, that’s crazy,” a firefighter outside Ladder 24 on West 31st Street told a reporter who showed him the selfie.
“It’s surprising. You gotta do your job. It doesn’t matter [if the house is empty or occupied], he said. “If something’s on fire, you need to extinguish it first before taking any pictures.”
He added, “That’s against our policy. We don’t post work pictures on social media.”
It remained unclear if there would be any repercussions for the 18 Detroit smoke eaters who are now eating crow.
“It was probably just a lapse of judgment — a 60th of a second in a multi-hour operation,” the deputy commissioner said.
“If disciplinary action is warranted,” it will be taken, he said, but the matter is still under investigation.
Additional reporting by Khristina Narizhnaya
via: https://nypost.com/2020/01/02/owners-of-detroits-burning-firefighter-selfie-house-are-furious/
Photo Credit: nypost.com