Firefighter loses brother in Selden blaze

Richie Zdenek, a Selden Fire Department volunteer firefighter, woke before dawn Sunday with a bad feeling.

A text message beeped on his phone. He knew the address of the fire: a friend's house where his brother, Henry Zdenek III, 26, often hung out.

Richie Zdenek, 22, who lives with his brother, ran to Henry's room. "I walked upstairs saying, 'Please be in here.' "

The room was empty.

He drove to the firehouse, where he jumped onto a truck going to the home, where fire was shooting out of top-floor windows. He grabbed a hose and ran inside but by that time, "the whole second floor was gone," Zdenek said.

After pouring water into upstairs bedrooms and a bathroom, Zdenek left the house. Other rescuers were helping a woman and three men with minor injuries.

Zdenek walked past an ambulance where an EMT was squeezing air into the lungs of an unconscious man with severe burns. A friend tapped him on the shoulder.

"You know that was your brother, right?" she said. He ran over to his chiefs, who confirmed that the man was his brother, who was later pronounced dead at Stony Brook University Medical Center. "I went down crying," Richie Zdenek said.

Chief Tony Ryan Tuesday credited Zdenek with focusing on his work, despite knowing his brother could be inside. A firefighter who lived nearby climbed up a stepladder and pulled Henry, who was unconscious, out of a window as Richie worked inside, he said.

The department is making a stress management expert available for Zdenek, who has returned to work, and others.

"It's times like these that we pull together," Ryan said.

The cause of the fire, which destroyed much of the now condemned home, is under review by the Suffolk County police arson squad as well as the homicide squad. The fire originated with smoking materials in a bedroom.

People at the scene said Henry Zdenek alerted a woman who had been asleep on the top floor to the fire, left the house, then returned, Ryan said.

Richie Zdenek said he's determined to go on fighting fires, but the loss of his brother has left him "a wreck."

He returns to the burned house to remember the brother he described as a fun-loving man who enjoyed riding bikes and visiting the city. "This calms me down," he said of the house, "knowing my brother was here."

Visitation will be Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m. at Moloney Funeral Home in Central Islip and a funeral service will be held there Monday at 10 a.m. Burial will follow at St. John of God Cemetery in Central Islip.

With Andrew Strickler