The longtime head of the Broward Public Defender's Office is picking up the pieces following a cataclysmic fire that claimed his home and several pets.

A suspected electrical fire left Howard Finkelstein's Plantation residence in tatters on Saturday evening, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported Monday. Although the Broward public defender and his family have been able to recover nearly all of their personal effects, the accident took the lives of Barnabus, Thumper and Dewey, two dogs and a cat who'd served as animal companions to the Finkelsteins for several years.

“I've had better days,” said Finkelstein when reached by the Daily Business Review on Tuesday. “It's a tragedy for us. We're animal people. Our lives revolve around them. … The pain is so deep because the love that they gave us and we gave them was so great. Our hearts are broken.”

Finkelstein's wife was on a business trip to Los Angeles with one of her two daughters when the fire began, and his other daughter had stopped by to feed the animals at approximately 5:30 in the afternoon. Because no one was at the Northwest 13th Street home at the time of the accident, Finkelstein was the first to discover the inferno around 9:30 p.m on Saturday. He was returning after traveling to Live Oak to attend a case the day before.

“I opened the door and I got hit with a locomotive, a train of smoke and heat,” Finkelstein said. Although he was propelled backwards, he soon ran back in to try to find his pets among the flames. “I couldn't get in very far and the smoke started to overcome me. I ran back out, took a couple breaths, and ran back in screaming the dogs' names.”

The public defender described his kitchen wall as “a pulsating ember of red and orange” and said the heat was unlike anything he'd ever experienced.

Despite managing to briefly quell the fire with an extinguisher, Finkelstein soon watched as the roof of his home was blown off. Following several dashes in and out of the house, he soon reached the “hard moment” he realized he was leaving the family's pets behind. He said, “It's very hard to talk about it” several days onward.

“The house is just an edifice. In a year, the house will be standing in some form or another. But the loves that were lost and the lives was crippling,” he said. ”I feel like I let them down. Their job was to give us love, and they did it magnificently. And my job was to keep them safe and I failed them.”

Finkelstein called it a minor miracle that Barnabus, Thumper and Dewey perished from asphyxiation, rather than the fire itself.

“If we were home there's a chance we would've fallen asleep,” he said. ”Right now we're trying to focus on how lucky we were to have them in our lives and that we're still here as family.”

Finkelstein told the Daily Business Review he was moved by “the courage and professionalism” shown by the Plantation Fire Department in extinguishing the fire. Requests for comment from the fire department's public information official, Joel Gordon, were not returned by press time.

The attorney, who has served as the head of the Broward Public Defender's Office since 2005 after being elected to the post, said the family is “taking it hour by hour and day by day.”

“This is when your faith in God and family really matters,” he said. “We're staying with our daughter. … Her dog [Barnabus] died in the fire as well. Our plan today is to get some clothes because we don't have any. … And basically take it as it comes.”

Although he is taking time out of the office in the face of the unexpected setback, Finkelstein said the tragedy will not affect his impending retirement as Broward Public Defender in December 2020. He added “in many ways, it's just another new beginning.”

“The people that work in the Public Defender's Office do just as well when I'm not there … They usually do better without my intervention,” he joked.

Even as they're coping with the intensity of their loss, Finkelstein said he and his family have experienced “an outpouring of love” since Saturday.

“Me, my wife and my daughters have been blown away, overwhelmed by the onslaught of good wishes,” he said, adding they've received offers from people they've never met before. “In the depths of this tragedy I have been confirmed in the goodness of mankind.”

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