Construction supervisor acquitted in Deutsche Bank fire. Two others still waiting for verdict.

NEW YORK (AP) — A construction company supervisor was acquitted of manslaughter and all other charges Tuesday in a blaze that killed two firefighters at a condemned bank tower at ground zero.

Jurors delivered their verdict for Salvatore DePaola, but the panel was still deliberating for Jeffrey Melofchik. The judge hasn't yet rendered a verdict for a third defendant and the company.

"I haven't slept in four years," DePaola said after the verdict.

"There are people who didn't do their jobs and they should have been up here," he said, pointing a finger at the fire department.

A worker's careless smoking sparked an August 2007 blaze that tore through nine floors of the former bank building, which was being taken down after being damaged and contaminated with toxic debris in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Firefighters Robert Beddia, 53, and Joseph P. Graffagnino, 33, died after being trapped in black, choking smoke and running out of air in their oxygen tanks.

Prosecutors said the break in the firefighting pipe, called a standpipe, was the crucial factor in their deaths. With the standpipe useless, it took firefighters about an hour to get water on the flames, letting the blaze build into a lethal inferno, prosecutors said.

They said Alvo, DePaola and Melofchik knew the pipe had broken about eight months before, when workers took down some braces that were holding it to the basement ceiling. The supports were proving stubbornly hard to scrub of asbestos, and the bosses were under pressure to speed the cleanup to keep it from going over budget, prosecutors said.

So after the break, the men had a 42-foot section of standpipe cut up and carted away and did nothing to repair or flag it, though Melofchik continued to sign daily reports saying the building's fire-suppression system was working, prosecutors said.

"They did the thing that killed those firefighters," Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joel Seidemann told jurors in a closing argument. "The evidence … woven together, paints a mosaic of overwhelming guilt — that but for these wholly reckless acts, these firefighters would be alive today."

But defense lawyers said the men didn't recognize the pipe's importance, and the disaster was a product of a web of shortsighted regulating and hazards beyond their control.

"This was a horrible, perfect storm of bad circumstance," defense lawyer Edward J.M. Little said in a closing argument. The two firefighters, he said, "died horrible deaths, but it wasn't because of anything the defendants did."

After the blaze, it emerged that the fire department hadn't inspected the building for more than a year, though it was required to do so every 15 days.

Meanwhile, building, environmental and labor inspectors hadn't realized that some measures meant to contain toxins could thwart firefighting. Plywood stairwell barriers slowed firefighters' progress, and a fan system kept smoke in and pulled it down, instead of letting it rise and escape.

The city and Melofchik's employer, general contractor Bovis Lend Lease, acknowledged errors. In response, the Fire Department created dozens of inspection and auditing jobs, and Bovis agreed to finance a $10 million memorial fund for slain firefighters' families, among other responses.

Meanwhile, the building lingered for almost a decade as a grim reminder of the attacks. The last of it was finally removed in February..