Wednesday’s building collapse in New York took the lives of eight people, including two kids, and injured 18 more – but it was a tearful plea from a young girl that perhaps struck the most emotional chord amid the abstract horror.
Zariah Coleman lost her home when the nearly century-old apartment building her family lived in partially collapsed at about 4 pm on Wednesday. While her human relatives were safe, one family member was still missing.
“When I first came home and I saw what happened to my house, the first thing I thought about was my cat,” she said, her voice shaking. “He was inside there and I tried to go under the tape. I was going to go get him, but I realized I didn’t know what I was going to face.”
Coleman said there were ominous rumbles during the excavation of the plot next to her building earlier in the week. Her cat, already skittish from the noises associated with construction, was probably hiding from emergency workers, she said as she fought back tears.
“Before all this happened, we used to feel shakes in our building. Like, it used to start shaking when they were working and stuff,” she said. “And I just, I just really hope they come and get our cat because he’s inside the house right now.”
The collapse in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood ripped apart shared walls with a neighboring building as the main structure came crashing down into the excavated pit next door.
It’s not clear why the building collapsed, although the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, the NYPD and the city’s building department are investigating building code violations and reviewing the construction work next door.
The landlord, Olufemi Falade, has made the city’s Worst Landlord list six times since 2017, according to New York’s Public Advocate’s office. The list is compiled from active code violations on properties a landlord owns.
Per the Gothamist:
“Before its collapse, the building had 98 open housing code violations for unsafe electrical wiring, inadequate water supply to the sprinkler system, a lack of smoke detectors, water outages and a bed bug infestation among other problems, according to city data.”
Twenty one of those violations were class C, meaning they were “immediately hazardous” to residents, and an inspection report earlier this year noted “a wide range of deficiencies” on the wall facing the excavation site, the New York Times reported.
Falade, who spent two weeks in jail in 2006 for racking up 1,800 violations across his properties, has accumulated some $450,000 in debt from unpaid taxes, water bills and fines from the city, according to the New York Post.
The collapsed building at 1321 Flatbush Ave. was the only structure adjacent to the excavation that was not protected by reinforcing steel buttresses, despite visible cracks in the 96-year-old building’s facade. Engineers called it “a recipe for disaster,” and Gothamist noted the contractors had ignored an earlier stop work order from the city.
Developer Robert Fischman has a “record of flouting orders” from the building department, including a stop work order at another property due to failure to install safety netting and sheds to protect pedestrians on the neighboring sidewalk, Gothamist reported. Fischman and his partner, Judy Swimer, were issued another violation after the city found they went ahead with demolition work in violation of the stop work order.
The Times also noted they did not have an additional safety inspector on-site at the Flatbush Avenue property and may have filed initial plans for a three-story structure – instead of the nine-story structure they sought approval for – to avoid paying for the additional inspector.
Several media outlets, including the New York Times and Gothamist, reached out to Fischman and Swimer, who did not return calls.
Eight families who lived in the Flatbush Avenue building are getting emergency housing, clothing, food and other assistance from a range of city agencies and private groups, including the mayor’s emergency relief fund, NYC Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Emergency Housing Services, and the nearby YMCA and Bethesda Church of God.
