Sean Ryan lit a match, passed it to Joseph LePore, who passed it back. Ryan flicked it onto the corner of a partially torn paper banner in the third-floor lounge, and the two walked back to their room about thirty feet away. They left the banner smoldering. No accelerant was used, but the fire burned hot enough to melt the synthetic carpet in the hallway, creating a nightmarish trap for students who tried to escape by crawling toward the stairs. The thick, toxic smoke made it nearly impossible to see. Dana Christmas, the resident assistant for the third floor, ran down the hallways banging on doors, trying to wake students who were sleeping through the alarm they had been conditioned to dismiss. Most students on the floor evacuated through the staircases in near-total darkness. A few, finding the hallways impassable, jumped more than forty feet to the ground.

Three students died in the fire. Fifty-eight others were injured, including four so severely burned they required lengthy hospital stays and rehabilitation. The three who died were honored posthumously with bachelor's degrees at the Class of 2003 graduation ceremony. Matt Rainey, a photographer for The Star-Ledger, documented the recovery of two of the most seriously burned survivors in a series that won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Filmmaker Guido Verweyen later created the documentary 'After the Fire: A True Story of Heroes & Cowards,' and journalist Robin Gaby Fisher published a book, 'After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship,' telling the survivors' stories. The tragedy was deeply personal for a small campus community where everyone seemed to know someone in Boland Hall.

Investigations revealed what many already suspected: the fire safety infrastructure at Boland Hall was dangerously inadequate. The dormitory had no sprinkler system, though the university maintained it was still in compliance with the building code. Years of false alarms had trained students to treat every activation as a nuisance rather than a warning. Faulty reporting procedures and insufficient safety precautions by university officials contributed substantially to the deaths and injuries. The revelations were damning. By the summer of 2000, Seton Hall had installed sprinklers in every dormitory on campus. When a trash fire broke out in Boland Hall in December of that year, the new sprinkler system confined it to a single trash barrel on the first floor. No one was hurt. The contrast between the two incidents made the case for sprinklers more powerfully than any report could.

The criminal investigation took three and a half years. On June 12, 2003, a 60-count indictment charged Ryan and LePore with starting the fire and felony murder for the three deaths. LePore's arrest was dramatic in itself - he backed his vehicle into an unmarked police car when officers tried to stop him. Both men eventually reached plea agreements and were sentenced to five years' imprisonment in early 2007. Ryan was paroled in May 2009. LePore waived his right to parole and served the remainder of his sentence. Seton Hall, shielded from negligence claims by its status as a religious nonprofit, nonetheless reached a settlement with the families of two students who died and ten who were injured.

The Boland Hall fire became a catalyst for campus fire safety reform across the country. In 2017, Senator Bob Menendez and Representatives Bill Pascrell and Donald Payne Jr. joined university officials to announce the Campus Fire Safety Education Act, which would provide federal funding for colleges to improve fire safety programs. The act traced a direct line to the night of January 19, 2000. On each anniversary of the fire, Seton Hall hosts a memorial Mass near the dormitory, at a memorial installed for the three students who did not survive. The campus itself has changed - sprinklered, safety-conscious, vigilant about alarms. But the lessons of Boland Hall extend well beyond South Orange. Every university sprinkler system installed in the years since, every fire safety orientation for incoming freshmen, carries an echo of what happened when a prank met a building without adequate protection and students who had learned to sleep through alarms.