Noe Martinez called out to his 43-year-old brother, asleep on a mattress on the floor, as smoke filled the attic apartment of a Logan Square two-flat that had been illegally converted into nine rental units.
Four months earlier, a Cook County judge had ordered the building’s owner, Adolfo Lopez, to stop renting the attic and basement units after months of failing to address a host of building code violations.
Jaime Martinez, a Mexican national who worked construction jobs, died in the early morning fire in October 2012. Authorities determined later that an electric space heater had been placed too close to bedding.
Last week county prosecutors charged Lopez with criminal contempt, a rare charge in connection with building code violations but one that has been brought in recent years against other allegedly negligent building owners after a death.
The two owners of the E2 nightclub, the scene of a stampede that saw 21 patrons killed in 2003, were cleared of involuntary manslaughter charges but convicted of criminal contempt for violating a housing court order to close a second floor because of building code violations in the months before the tragedy. Calvin Hollins Jr. and Dwain Kyles were sentenced to two years in prison, but that sentence was overturned on appeal. The two are awaiting resentencing.
In addition, the owner of an abandoned South Side building that collapsed during a 2010 fire, killing two firefighters, pleaded guilty in May to criminal contempt for failing to fix numerous building code violations, including securing the vacant building and repairing its roof. Chuck Dai was sentenced to six months in jail.
According to the criminal complaint against Lopez, the city first took him to court almost five years before the fatal fire, suing him over 17 separate building code violations, including illegally converting the basement and attic into apartments without adequate exits or working smoke detectors.
Lopez agreed to bring the basement and attic into compliance in August 2009 but failed to follow through, according to the complaint.
The case slowly wound its way through court. In June 2012 a judge ordered Lopez not to rent, use or lease the basement or attic of the building at 1645 N. Central Park Ave.
Lopez last appeared in court 11 days before the fatal fire. Lopez had obtained a permit to return the attic and basement areas back into storage spaces, but a building inspector told the judge that Lopez had failed to schedule an inspection as ordered, according to the complaint.
Judge Daniel B. Malone again ordered Lopez to keep the attic and basement empty, authorities said. But Lopez continued to rent the attic apartment to the Martinez brothers despite the court order and the lack of working smoke detectors inside the building, prosecutors charged.
Lopez could not be reached for comment.
A charge of criminal contempt carries no maximum sentence, so Lopez faces anything from probation to multiple years in prison if convicted, said a spokeswoman for the state’s attorney’s office.
Jaime Martinez’s mother, Amelia Betancourt, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Lopez and the makers of the electric heater in 2013. Lopez settled the case in February for $300,000, court records show. The corporations agreed to pay an undisclosed amount, her attorney said.
At a 2013 deposition, Betancourt testified that Lopez had asked her sons to move out of the attic but later changed his mind. He allowed them to stay but increased their rent $50 a month, she said.
“He was a good guy, he was a good kid,” Amelia Betancourt said in the deposition of son Jaime Martinez.
She said he gave money to her and his father from what he earned working cash-only construction jobs.
Noe Martinez, who survived the blaze, told relatives he believed his brother had awakened the night of the fire but became disoriented from the smoke.
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Jaime Martinez, who died from smoke inhalation and second- and third-degree burns, was buried in Puebla, Mexico, where he had lived before moving to Chicago 12 years earlier.
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