Philadelphia Seeks Causes of MOVE Disaster : A Second Look at an Urban Nightmare

A gray, misty dawn was breaking over the narrow row houses as Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor, clad in a flak jacket and baseball cap, crawled on his stomach to an open doorway and bellowed through a bullhorn.

“Attention MOVE,” Sambor called. “This is America!”

With those words at about 5:30 a.m. last May 13, a daylong urban nightmare began. At its climax, a state police helicopter swooped over the house under siege at 6221 Osage Ave. and dropped a makeshift bomb onto a roof littered with tarpaulins, timber and three gasoline or kerosene cans.

The resulting inferno engulfed a neighborhood and shocked the world. The toll: 11 dead, including four children; 61 homes destroyed, up to 260 people left homeless.

Behind Sambor during the assault were about 500 heavily armed police whose only written tactical plan was scrawled on a single 4-by-6-inch file card. Against them was MOVE, a bizarre “back-to-nature” cult that had turned from trying to free animals from the zoo to terrorizing their middle-class neighbors with brutal beatings and loudspeaker death threats against the mayor and the President.

It was disaster on many fronts:

--Top-level communications broke down so badly that Mayor W. Wilson Goode sat crying in his office as water hoses were turned off and the fire raged unchecked three miles away.

--Planning was so poor that the commanding official, Managing Director Leo A. Brooks, first learned police were evacuating 300 neighbors in preparation for the assault from a radio news report while driving on I-95 through Baltimore.

--Control was so loose that the police commissioner says he did not know his officers came armed with an anti-tank gun and .50-caliber and .60-caliber heavy machine guns, nor that a bomb squad sergeant had thrown explosives and demolished the wood and brick fronts of four adjoining homes.

--Intelligence was so faulty that police did not know MOVE had fortified the house and a rooftop bunker with thick tree trunks cut in a nearby park, railroad ties stolen from nearby tracks and steel sewer plates plucked from surrounding streets. Nor did police know the number of children inside.

--And coordination was so weak that neither the mayor nor the district attorney apparently knew that police had possessed arrest warrants for two MOVE leaders in June of 1984. Eleven months later, similar warrants against four Move members were cited as justification for the police assault.

Disturbing Questions

What happened? Could bloodshed have been avoided? Who is to blame? Disturbing new questions, as well as answers, have emerged after eight days of detailed testimony by 37 witnesses before an 11-member Special Investigation Commission appointed by Goode. Eight more days of hearings are scheduled.

While the full story may never be known, the testimony paints a picture of the nation’s fifth largest city in crisis, its leaders paralyzed, its residents terrified, its police apparently out of control.

The tangled roots of the crisis date back at least six years.

By then, MOVE dogma had evolved from demonstrating for animal rights in pet shops and zoos to advocating anarchy and practicing armed insurrection. Members wore their hair in long dreadlocks, went without bathing and adopted the surname “Africa.”

On Aug. 8, 1978, police stormed MOVE’s first headquarters to put an end to health and housing code violations.

Fought Back

MOVE members fought back from windows of the barricaded Victorian house about 30 blocks east of Osage Avenue, firing carbines, rifles, shotguns and semiautomatic pistols. The gun battle left officer James J. Ramp dead and eight police and firefighters wounded. Nine MOVE members later were convicted of murder. Their house was bulldozed to rubble.

Neither side forgot the day.

By 1980, Goode was the city’s managing director under then-Mayor William J. Green. In the next two years, Goode met quietly about 15 times with MOVE members who demanded that he free their jailed comrades and replace their house.

Goode said he was powerless. But he continued to meet with MOVE after being elected the city’s first black mayor in 1983. He even offered through an intermediary, he said, only four days before the assault this year, to go secretly to the MOVE house to negotiate. The offer was refused.

“They indicated if we wanted to come take them, come take them,” Goode said.

Welcomed at First

Some residents in the mostly black, well-kept Osage Avenue neighborhood at first welcomed MOVE when it took over a two-story row house in mid-1983. Inez Nichols bought winter coats for the members’ ill-clad children, and set out loaves of bread when she saw them eating from garbage cans. “Our children played with their children,” she said.

The welcome soon turned to terror.

MOVE members hung raw meat in the trees to attract animals, and spread feces and garbage in the yard to draw vermin. They fenced off a shared back alley, and blocked a sewer drain.

Often starting before dawn, MOVE members used loudspeakers to scream insults and threats, curses and diatribes. MOVE members with rifles ran across rooftops at night. Four neighbors were beaten, one bitten in the face, groin and back over a parking space.

“We felt like hostages,” said neighbor Cassandra Carter.

After repeated pleas to the mayor and police, Goode asked Dist. Atty. Edward Rendell if warrants were outstanding against MOVE members. Rendell reported only two misdemeanor warrants. His June 21 report did not mention that at least one felony warrant also existed, and that police recently had stopped a state parole officer from trying to arrest MOVE leader Frank James Africa for violating parole on riot charges. Rendell has yet to testify.

No Confrontation

On Aug. 8, 1984, the sixth anniversary of the 1978 shoot-out, police amassed bomb squads and stake-out teams and braced for a confrontation. None occurred. Police pulled back.

The city did nothing.

Mayor Goode testified that he had ordered all city agencies to avoid any contact with MOVE, even to avoid enforcing obvious violations of the law, to prevent confrontation. It was a “hands-off policy,” he said.

“I did not want to risk any inspector going to the house and pushing a button and risking lives,” Goode said.

By October 1984, MOVE members were openly building fortifications. Windows were boarded up. Thick trees cut by city park workers were carried in. A heavy generator was dragged in, shaking nearby houses. A bunker, lined with steel and railroad ties, was built on the roof.

At one point, police civil affairs officer George Draper asked MOVE members to remove the logs and heavy timber stacked on the sidewalk. Did they respond?

“They responded,” Draper replied. “They put it on top of the roof.”

Increasingly Violent

Inside the growing fortress, MOVE dogma was also turning increasingly violent.

Louise James Africa, who owned the house and whose son Frank James Africa was a MOVE member, fled in fear. She said MOVE leader James Africa had asked members whether they would kill their mothers to prove loyalty to the cult. Several had agreed.

Neighbors also were growing violent. Frustrated community leaders contacted city newspapers and held a press conference demanding help from the governor. Angry residents warned they would “take the law into their own hands.”

Public pressure building, Goode acted. On Tuesday, May 7, he told Managing Director Brooks to have Sambor prepare a tactical plan to arrest four MOVE members and take the children under a protective court order.

The arrest warrants, drawn that week, charged terroristic threats, harassment, criminal conspiracy, disorderly conduct, possession of explosives and riot.

Sambor reported back to Goode at noon on May 9, shortly before the mayor flew to Hampton, Va., to give a commencement address.

“The mayor indicated at that time he was not interested in the details and that was up to the managing director,” Sambor said.

Left for Weekend

But Brooks already had left for a three-day Mother’s Day weekend with his parents in Virginia. Driving home on Sunday afternoon, May 12, he heard a radio report that police had begun evacuating Osage Avenue at 10 that morning.

“I had no idea that anything would happen on May 13,” said Brooks, the mayor’s chief aide and second-ranking official in the city.

At 9 p.m. that night Brooks went to Sambor’s office. For 30 minutes Brooks listened, jotting 13 lines of notes on a file card that he then used to brief Goode by phone.

That dog-eared card, which Brooks found in his pants two weeks later, is the only known written record of the police tactical plan. Sambor said he did not write one because it was “virtually impossible” to control leaks.

“I feel very strongly about that, that too much information gets out,” Sambor said.

In any case, Goode’s briefings remain in dispute. Both Sambor and Brooks insist they told the mayor on separate occasions that police would detonate explosives on the MOVE house. Goode denies he was told those plans.

By dawn on May 13, Sambor was ready. He crawled nervously to an open doorway across from the MOVE house, and read the warrants through a bullhorn. He gave MOVE members 15 minutes to come out peacefully.

After 20 minutes, police began hurling smoke grenades at the MOVE house. MOVE loudspeakers soon replied with curses and taunts, screaming that MOVE would kill police and never surrender.

The loudspeakers stopped when two Fire Department “Squrt” guns, 54-foot-tall cranes topped by powerful nozzles, began spraying 1,000 gallons of water a minute to dislodge the roof bunker.

Shooting started moments later.

MOVE fired first, Sambor said. How does he know? “Because I was there,” he replied, adding that a bullet shattered a glass door near him.

For two hours, the fierce thunder of automatic weapons filled the air. Volleys cracked overhead blocks away as police fired until they ran out of ammunition, then called for more.

Sambor said his men shot so much because MOVE members were firing automatic weapons. He could not explain why no automatic weapons were found in the MOVE ruins.

Sambor’s plan called for stationing about 80 stakeout officers on two rooftops and in surrounding homes. Two demolition teams were in houses on both sides of MOVE.

According to Sambor, the two “insertion teams” would set six explosive charges each to create three-inch holes in the MOVE walls. Tear gas then would be pumped in, and concussion grenades inserted, to force the occupants out.

The plan failed almost immediately.

Inside 6219 Osage Ave., the hole in the MOVE wall had revealed a gun port in the log fortifications within. “B Team” leader Sgt. Edward Connor was shot in his bulletproof vest, and his men were pinned down by MOVE gunfire.

Connor has yet to testify. According to Sambor and Connor’s own statement to investigators, he hurled powerful explosives at the MOVE house to allow his men to escape. The blast visibly shook a television camera filming two blocks away.

Police photographs taken about noon show that the explosions demolished the front of the MOVE house and badly damaged three adjoining homes. Logs are exposed in the MOVE house, brick walls are shattered, debris scattered in the street.

In his testimony, Sambor said he had not authorized, and only learned days later, that Connor had blown the fronts off four homes. At the time, Sambor said, “I thought it could have resulted from a heavy concentration of automatic weapons fire.”

The “Squrt” guns continued for five hours, firing 640,000 gallons of water at the roof. Plywood sheets were blown off, but the bunker didn’t budge.

Sambor and Brooks conferred. After several hours, they rejected as unsafe an idea to knock the bunker off with a crane. At 4 p.m., police escorted a local black pastor, Dr. Urcille Ifille, and three local leaders to plead through bullhorns to send out the children.

“Not a whisper” came in reply, Ifille reported. Indeed, no sound but gunfire had come from the MOVE house after 7:30 a.m. Darkness approached.

“I decided that an explosive device should be used and that it should be dropped from a helicopter,” Sambor said.

The reason remains unclear. Brooks said the bomb was to create a hole for the tear gas. But Sambor said officers had already fired tear gas into the first floor through the broken brick wall, but the gas had dissipated.

In 15 minutes, Officer William C. Klein, a former Marine Corps demolition expert who prepares the city’s July 4 fireworks displays, had built the bomb in a small canvas satchel.

Although Klein wouldn’t confirm it until three months later, the bomb contained both Tovex TR-2, a commercial explosive, and Composition C-4, a powerful military plastic explosive used against tanks, bunkers and armored vehicles.

The state police helicopter made five passes overhead. At 5:27 p.m., bomb disposal squad Lt. Frank Powell leaned out and dropped the bomb beside the bunker and near red and blue petrol cans. The fuse burned 42 seconds, then flames shot 15 feet high.

Four blocks away, Brooks watched nervously from the ninth-floor balcony of a geriatric center. He had already briefed the mayor by phone.

“It blew wood in all directions,” Brooks said. “Then the smoke rose, a very light gray smoke. Then a white dog came out of the hole, crossed the fire wall and two other roofs and lay down . . . Then I saw a trickle of yellow blaze.”

Shortly before 6 p.m., Sambor said, he went to Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond and “indicated to him I would like to let the fire burn, let the bunker burn.”

“It was a recommendation, a request,” Sambor said. “I asked him for his concurrence.” Richmond has yet to testify, but the fire was allowed to burn.

Goode had watched the dawn assault at home on television and had spent the day at City Hall. Now he watched a TV in his office as the flames spread unchecked and frantically called Brooks. It was 6 p.m.

“I gave my first order of the day, which was ‘Put the fire out,’ ” Goode said. The fire raged on. Brooks told Goode that he already had ordered Sambor to extinguish the blaze.

But moments later, the “Squrt” guns that had sprayed all morning, were shut off. The fire raged on.

In his office, Goode began to cry. “I cried because I knew at that point that lives would be lost and I knew that homes would be destroyed and I knew, that despite all our good intentions, we had on our hands an absolute disaster,” he said.

Only two survived from MOVE. Ramona James Africa, the group’s foul-mouthed “minister of communication,” and 13-year-old Birdie Africa, ran out into the back alley about 7 p.m. and were captured. That much is known.

Still disputed is what happened to others who tried to flee the flames. Birdie told police he ran out with other children. Goode said five emerged, Sambor said four. Whether they ran back inside, or were forced back, is unknown.

But all died inside. Autopsies showed that four men, three women and four children died from smoke inhalation, thermal burns and carbon monoxide poisoning. None had been shot.

The MOVE siege was over.