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Fallen Fire Cadet's Death Benefit Application Rejected; Family Requests Help

BALTIMORE – Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski asked Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday to assist the family of a Baltimore fire cadet killed in a training exercise whose death benefit claim was rejected by the Department of Justice.

Writing to Holder a day after The Baltimore Sun reported that a nearly $300,000 claim on behalf of the two children of Racheal M. Wilson was denied because of missing information, Mikulski said that city fire officials did not receive “substantive responses” when they asked the Justice Department for additional information needed for the benefits to be awarded.

“We cannot compound this tragedy by summarily dismissing the request for earned benefits by saying that the information provided is insufficient,” wrote Mikulski, who is the head of an appropriations subcommittee that oversees Justice funding.

In an accompanying statement, Mikulski called Wilson’s death during a 2007 training exercise a “terrible tragedy.”

“Her children have been robbed of their mother – and now they’re being robbed of the financial support that she earned and they deserve,” Mikulski said.

Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin joined Mikulski’s call for a speedy resolution to the matter. “We certainly want to make sure that the cadet’s family gets every benefit they are entitled to,” said spokeswoman Susan Sullam. “The senator is keenly interested in the well-being of her family.”

Wilson was asphyxiated in a West Baltimore rowhouse in which her instructors had set fires as part of a training exercise. A series of investigations found that the exercise violated scores of federal standards. Wilson had been given faulty protective pants and sent into a building where too many fires had been set with an inexperienced instructor who didn’t have a radio. When the flames burned out of control, she became trapped in a third-floor window.

Wilson’s death at age 29 prompted calls for change within the department. The commander of the training academy was dismissed, and the practice of setting training fires in abandoned homes was immediately halted. The fire chief resigned a few months later.

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