Seton Hall arsonists Joseph T. LePore and Sean Ryan were denied parole Monday afternoon, ensuring that they will serve more time on their sentences for starting a dormitory fire in January 2000 that killed 3 students and injured 58 others. Newark Star-Ledger feature reporter Robin Gaby Fisher was keeping an eye on the hearings—a series of articles she wrote for the paper about two of the victims, Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, became the basis of a book, After the Fire, which will be published by Little, Brown this summer. “I was worried about how Shawn and Alvaro would react if the boys who started the fire were released that quickly,” she said when Andy Heidel asked about her reaction to the parole board’s decision. “As much as Shawn and Alvaro are not, and have never been about seeking revenge, they do feel that Sean Ryan and Joseph LePore should be punished for all the pain they’ve caused. For all Shawn and Alvaro have suffered, and because they feel so passionately for the families of the boys who died, I think they would have been terribly hurt had the outcome of yesterday’s parole hearing been different.”
We also wondered what had originally drawn her to telling the story of Simons and Llanos’s recovery. “When it was proposed to me by an editor, I knew immediately it had the potential to be the story of a career and that is exactly what it has turned out to be,” she said. “I always said this was a story that was meant to be told. Everything fell into place quickly. You can’t make up more compelling characters than Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos. You root for them through the whole book. The payoff for the reader is that they are so worth rooting for. They’re so special.”
(This photo of Fisher with Simons and Llanos was taken by Matt Rainey, whose photos for the original newspaper articles won the Pulitzer Prize.)
Andy was also able to get hold of this timeline…
