Lieutenant Kevin White told jurors Tuesday things got very bad, very quickly on the morning of January 2005 as firefighters battled a fast moving fire on East 178th street in the Bronx.

White was serving on a backup unit. At one point he saw six firefighters who had retreated to four windows on the fourth floor, not one of them had a fire escape.

Shortly after the trapped firefighters issued a mayday call with heavy smoke all around them, White ordered portable ladders and ropes. But it was already too late.

"That's when the first member dropped. I gave a mayday. Man down in the rear. Another member dropped. I gave a mayday. Two men down in the rear," said White during his testimony.

Lieutenant Curtis Meyran and firefighter John Bellew jumped about 50 feet to their deaths.

Four other firefighters jumped but survived.

As Lieutenant White testified, members of Meyran and Bellew's families wept from their seats.

"You wanna get the full picture. People want to shelter you. It's not enough to say he jumped out a window Jeanette. It got too hot. What happened? I wanna know what happened," said Jeanette Meyran.

Prosecutors blame two tenants for putting up illegal walls in apartments they rented. They said overcrowding in the unit of defendant Rafael Castillo overloaded extension cords and partitions in the apartment above, rented by Caridad Coste, trapped the firefighters.

The prosecutor said landlord Caesar Rios should have known the partitions were there.

Defense attorneys said the two men died that day because of conditions that frigid morning.

Even before the first mayday call was sent out, radio transmissions made it clear that they were having problems with water pressure.

The defense attorneys also said the firefighters might have used safety ropes to escape, but the FDNY had pulled them from use a few years earlier. They were reissued shortly after the tragedy.

"A lot of what the prosecution is saying is not useful in terms of what could have happened had this so-called partition not been there. It wouldn't have made any difference at all," said Neal Comer, Rios' attorney.

A paramedic and another firefighter who were at the scene that day are expected to take the stand on Wednesday.