DePaola attorney Rick Pasacreta said that this explanation did not jibe with his working class client, whom he said was a convenient person to “take the fall.” Said the lawyer: "Someone had to be blamed, but it couldn’t be anyone in power.” He claimed DePaola made only $2 per hour more than the other site foreman and $4 per hour more than the other workers.

Pasacreta mocked the prosecutor’s argument that DePaola, on his modest hourly salary, felt financial pressures to rush the demolition. "Respectfully, are you kidding me? Financial realities set in for Sal?” Pasacreta asked, incredulously. “As a union worker, he had every reason to prolong the job.”

Seidemann derided what he called this “appeal to sympathy.” He said: “This is a Madison Avenue attempt to say that since [DePaola] is working class, he couldn’t have done the crime.”

In addition to arguing that multiple inspectors and institutions shared blame for unsafe conditions in the building, Little said that several factors made the fire difficult to fight. “The stairwells were blocked," he said. "[Firefighters] couldn’t go up. There were no safe havens in those stairwells. The negative air system sucked the air down against all expectation.”

Little said that several of the firefighter witnesses pointed to how the jobsite’s negative air system, designed to keep asbestos contained, worsened visibility during the blaze. He quoted one as saying: “Smoke usually rises, but this came down.”  Another described it as falling “like a curtain,” while another testified, “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.”

The only defense witness, fire safety expert Craig Beyler, designed a computer model mapping the effect the negative air system had on visibility. On one side of the computer screen, he represented jobsite conditions with the system, contending that smoke from a smoke-filled upper floor spread to the floor below within about four minutes.

On another side of the screen, the same model hypothesizing site conditions with the system removed showed the lower floor still relatively clear after 14 minutes, when it was believed that firefighters on that floor started calling “May Days” on their radios.

Little finished his summation shortly after displaying that model, telling jurors, “You’ve been here for 10 weeks. It’s now your job, and it’s a heavy responsibility...the prosecution will have the last word.”

The prosecution was set to finish those words before week's end, when the jury begins to decide the fates of Melofchik and DePaola. State Superior Court Judge Rena K. Uviller will decide the cases of Alvo and the subcontractor. They had opted for a "bench trial."

They are accused of a total of 20 counts of criminally negligent homicide, second-degree manslaughter and second-degree reckless endangerment.