Two building owners and three contractors were arrested Thursday morning on charges including manslaughter, assault and criminally negligent homicide over the East Village blast that destroyed three buildings and killed two people nearly a year ago.
Petty corner-cutting and blatant greed caused the blast, officials said.
Sharing the blame, officials accused, are a penny-pinching building landlord, her son, her contractor, and the contractor’s unlicensed plumber, who installed a tangle of dangerous and illegal gas connections that they hid from Con Ed behind a locked basement door.
Singled out for particular blame were contractor Dilber Kukic, 40, and the landlord’s son, Michael Hyrnenko Jr., 30.
The two were caught on building surveillance video the day of the deadly blast and fire responding to a fumes complaint from the ground-floor sushi restaurant, then quickly running to fiddle with their hidden basement gas set-up — literally sprinting through the restaurant without warning a single patron, officials allege.
Moments later, restaurant-goer Nicholas Figueroa, 23, and restaurant worker Moises Lucon, 26, were fatally engulfed in the blast, which also injured two dozen others, among them Kukic and Michael Jr.
The five suspects — the contractor, two plumbers and the landlord and her son — “created a deadly inferno fueled by an illegal gas delivery system installed at 121 Second Avenue, leading to the loss of two young lives and leaving more than a dozen others with serious, permanent injuries,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in announcing the arrests.
The March 26, 2015, blast, between East Seventh Street and St. Marks Place, was completely foreseeable and preventable, he said.
Landlord Maria Hrynenko, 56, her son, Michael Jr., Bronx-based contractor Kukic and plumber Jerry Ioannidis, 59, were all charged with second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, second-degree assault and reckless endangerment.
Ioannidis was charged with one additional count of falsifying business records. The final defendant, licensed plumber Andrew Trombettas, 57, was charged with offering a false instrument, for allegedly lending his name and license number to paperwork.
“Integrity and safety are indelibly linked,” Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters said at a press conference announcing the arrests. “Cutting corners has its costs.”
Fire officials were on hand at the conference to praise the bravery of their responders, including off-duty firefighter Mike Shepherd, who happened to be in the area at the time of the blast, and was caught on video helping rescue a hysterical woman who was stranded on her fire escape.
“On the way down, the fire was so hot, it melted the soles of his shoes,” Vance noted of Shepherd.
“We came within moments of losing many firefighters,” FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.
The defendants were scheduled to be arraigned before Justice Kirke Bartley beginning at 2:15 p.m. Thursday.
“I’m a good person,” Hrynenko uttered to reporters as authorities hauled her into the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office on Thursday morning.
Officials gave this chronology of events:
In 2013, Hryenko hired Kukic as a general contractor to renovate the five-story building at the blast’s epicenter, 121 Second Ave., officials said. The building housed four floors of residential units and a street-level Japanese restaurant, Sushi Park.
Kukic then hired Ioannidis, who had no license, to do the building’s plumbing. Ioannidis tricked Con Edison into believing the work was being done by a professional by submitting false paperwork bearing the name of a licensed master plumber, Trombettas, officials said.
“Trombettas never went to 121 Second Ave. and is accused of renting his license to Ioannidis and others, enabling the filing of false paperwork,” Vance said.
In early 2014, Hrynenko, the landlord, found tenants for the building’s four floors of apartments with help from her son, Michael. But Con Ed had not yet approved the installation of tenant gas meters
Apparently impatient to connect her tenants’ stoves, in July 2014 Hrynenko allegedly told her contractor, Kukic, to just run lines upstairs from Sushi Park’s ground-floor gas meter, officials allege.
Ioannidis, the unlicensed plumber, installed the flexible hosing to do so, officials said. A Con Ed and FDNY inspection easily found the nightmare set-up. Con Ed turned off the gas, advising the landlord to hire a licensed plumber to remedy the situation.
Instead, the defendants constructed another illegal, rickety tangle of pipes and valves. This time, they ran a connection from Sushi Park’s meter to a gas meter — behind locked doors and hidden from Con Ed — in the vacant building next door, at 119 Second Ave., also owned by Hrynenko, officials said.
Two months later, in August 2014, Ioannidis — hiding the illegal, building-to-building siphoning and again using Trombettas’ license — called Con Ed in to approve the Sushi Park gas meter. By mid-month, Con Ed, believing the set-up was only servicing the restaurant, turned the gas back on.
Fast-forward to March 26, 2015, the day of the blast.
Ioannidis and Kukic, the general contractor, were still trying to get approval for their original plans for tenant gas connections. They prepared for another Con Ed inspection by shutting off the jerry-rigged connection between the two buildings. They still failed inspection after Con Ed found other deficiencies.
After Con Ed left, Kukic and Michael, the landlord’s son, restored the gas connection between 121 and 119 Second Ave. — not realizing that several shut-off valves were in fact still open, allowing gas to pour into the restaurant.
An hour after Con Ed left, a Sushi Park employee smelled gas, and called the landlord. Hyrnenko told Kukic, her contractor, to check out what was happening, and he went with Michael into the restaurant.
The two were caught on surveillance tape, officials said, “swiftly sprinting out of the restaurant without warning any of the patrons or workers and running toward the East 7th Street entrance to the building basement, where the illegal gas delivery system was set up,” Vance said in a statement.
Moments later, the explosion occurred.