From 1985: Police storm MOVE compound: Shots erupt as officers close in

This story was originally published on May 13, 1985.

Gunfire erupted around MOVE’s fortified West Philadelphia rowhouse at 6 a.m. today as police moved in to evict the radical group.

The shots broke out at about the same time as firemen unleashed high- powered hoses on the wooden bunker atop the house at 6221 Osage Ave. It was not immediately possible to tell whether the shots came from the MOVE house or the surrounding police.

Activity in the area intensified in the dark hours before dawn, as police and firefighters poured men and equipment into the barricaded zone.

At about 3:30 a.m., squads of officers from the bomb-disposal unit and additional stakeout police began moving inside the perimeter, while other officers erected a wall of sandbags in the alley behind the MOVE house.

A Philadelphia Gas Works crew had shut off gas to the MOVE house from a main on 62d Street at Osage Avenue, and workers for Philadelphia Electric Co. stood by waiting for word from police to shut off power on the block.

Five fire trucks under the command of Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond were moved into the area. Unmarked tractor-trailers also began appearing in the barricaded area.

All 80 members of the Police Department’s four squads in the stakeout unit, who are trained in the use of high-powered and automatic weapons, had been ordered to report for duty at midnight. By the time police put their plan into effect, more than 200 officers had surrounded the compound, police officials said.

Before the onset of the police operation, MOVE members had dared the army of officers to storm their fortified house.

In a loud harangue that began shortly after midnight, a man’s voice had called out for a confrontation:

“Send in the CIA! Send in the FBI! Send in the SWAT teams! . . . We have something for all of you!

“Bring in the machine guns!” the voice shouted. “We’re going to swat you (expletive) down!”

Police sources said arrest warrants were prepared last week for six adult MOVE members believed to be inside the Osage Avenue building, which was also believed to house as many as 12 children. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment on the warrants last night.

Although specific charges against the six were not available, sources said they stemmed from complaints by MOVE’s neighbors. Residents contended that they had been assaulted, threatened and harassed by MOVE members, who first began filtering into the Osage Avenue house about four years ago.

The property, where packs of stray dogs and cats roamed, had been cited for numerous sanitation violations.

The last time police evicted MOVE from a house was Aug. 8, 1978, when a savage gun battle erupted that killed police Officer James Ramp and wounded several other police officers and firefighters. The incident occurred at a twin Victorian-style house at 307-309 N. 33d St. in Powelton Village, and followed a long siege.

MOVE’s Powelton Village house was bulldozed immediately after the shootout. Nine MOVE members were convicted on murder charges in connection with Ramp’s death and are serving prison terms.

MOVE, which calls itself a back-to-nature organization, spurns most accepted sanitary standards and modern technology. The organization’s name is not an acronym and does not stand for anything. All MOVE members use the surname Africa.

At 11 last night, plainclothes officers began going door to door in the vicinity of the MOVE house to make certain that residents had followed police instructions to evacuate their homes.

Detective Henry Agnew said that residents were told to be out of the area by 10 p.m., but that police had allowed them an hour’s grace period. People who refused police orders to leave their homes were subject to arrest, Agnew said.

No such arrests were reported.

All residents in the 6200 block of Osage Avenue had been told to leave, as had residents of some homes on South 62d, Pine and Addison Streets and on Cobbs Creek Parkway. Police also had asked that cars be removed from the streets. Autos that were not removed by their owners were towed away early today.

DeVore Arnold, 62, said he left his Cobbs Creek Parkway home willingly, but the family next door to him did not want to leave. Arnold said police began pounding on his neighbors’ door with a crowbar and threatened to break it down if the people refused to evacuate.

“I don’t think that was right,” Arnold said. “They had no order, nothing to show them. They just told them to get out.”

The people next door left, Arnold said.

Police officials estimated that 250 families were evacuated.

Clifford Bond, block captain on Osage Avenue, had met briefly early last night with lawyer Anthony D. Jackson in the home of Inez Nichols, who also lives on the street, and discussed the evacuation plan.

Bond said he was afraid for his family.

“I’m afraid for them over there,” Bond said, nodding in the direction of the MOVE house, “even though they might not understand that.”

Nichols said she was not frightened. “It takes a lot for me to be afraid. It’s more aggravating than anything. Just plain aggravating.”

A civilian group of negotiators had attempted to resolve the situation quietly, and had spent the late afternoon shuttling back and forth between the police barricade at 62d Street and the MOVE house. Two members of the team, Novella Williams, president of Citizens for Progress and a member of the Urban Coalition, and Michael A. Nutter, assistant to City Councilman Angel L. Ortiz, expressed little hope last night that their efforts would succeed.

MOVE members at the Osage Avenue house had contended that their actions were political, and that they would not cease their conflict with the community until MOVE members currently in jail were released.

“As far as the MOVE people are concerned, that’s it,” Williams said. ‘’There is no compromise. Their position is come on in and get them."

Williams said she spoke by telephone with Mayor Goode, and “what the mayor said to me is that when the whole story comes out, people will understand. He said we have to do something.”

Goode, whose administration had come under increasing pressure from area residents to take action against MOVE, was in Hampton, Va., earlier yesterday, delivering a commencement speech at the Hampton Institute. He returned to the city late in the afternoon, according to a spokesman for his office.

Police barricades went up around the area about 9 a.m. yesterday. Detectives with clipboards were positioned at the barricades and took down the name and address of each person entering or leaving the area.

Police had kept a low profile in the neighborhood throughout the day yesterday, posting a single uniformed officer across the street from the MOVE house and a half-dozen plainclothes officers a half block away at the corner of 62d Street and Osage.

The police presence began to increase about 4 p.m., as plainclothes officers, carrying walkie-talkies, began patrolling the street in pairs. A blue Volkswagen van, believed to be a police vehicle, was parked in front of the MOVE house about 4 p.m.

About 4:30 p.m., about 15 officers in riot gear walked up 62d Street toward Larchwood Avenue. Plainclothes officers watched the house through binoculars from 62d Street.

A dozen mounted police officers dispersed sightseers who gathered along Cobbs Creek Parkway, a block from Osage Avenue.

Two male MOVE members went onto the roof of their house, where the group had erected a wooden bunker that they can enter through a trapdoor, about 5 p.m., while a police helicopter hovered overhead.

One man went back inside after a few minutes while the other went to work on the bunker, nailing on additional planks. When storm clouds threatened rain, two bare-chested MOVE members put a yellow tarpaulin over the bunker and removed a piece of canvas to reveal several gun portals. They continued to work on the bunker into the night.

The city’s plans for the eviction of MOVE were completed Saturday morning during a meeting between high-level police and fire officials, including Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor and Fire Commissioner Richmond, sources said.

While a large number of police were involved at Osage Avenue, several plainclothes officers maintained surveillance of two other MOVE sites, two attached brick homes in the 5100 block of Pentridge Avenue and a house in the 1600 block of South 56th Street. Both were reported to be quiet, and residents of those areas said they had encountered no problems with MOVE.

It was about four years ago that MOVE began settling into the house at Osage Avenue. At first, the group moved in only children, some of them sons and daughters of MOVE members imprisoned after the 1978 shootout.

The Osage Avenue house was occupied at that time by Louise James, who is the sister of John Africa, MOVE’s founder. Neighbors said Louise James became a MOVE member about the time the children began arriving.

John Africa was not in the Powelton Village house at the time of the 1978 siege. He was a fugitive on charges that he had conspired with other MOVE members to manufacture bombs. After nearly four years on the run, Africa was arrested May 13, 1981, with eight supporters on federal fugitive warrants in Rochester, N.Y. He dropped from view after July 22, 1981, when he was acquitted of the charges in a federal court trial in which he represented himself.

MOVE members, however, have continued to invoke his name and claim to have been in contact with him as recently as May 1.

More adults began living at the Osage Avenue house about three years ago, neighbors said. With them came dozens of stray cats and the first serious sanitation and noise problems. Neighbors said they complained to a variety of officials, who told them to maintain a low profile.

Neighbors had estimated that there were five adults and 10 children living at the house, compared with current police estimates of six adults and as many as 12 children. By contrast, 12 adults - five men and seven women - and 11 children, plus more than 50 dogs, were taken from the Powelton Village house after the 1978 police action.

The problems escalated at the Osage Avenue house early last year, when MOVE began work on a series of additions and alterations to the house. First they built a shelter for the animals across the back alley, which prevented other residents on the rowhouse block from driving their cars through the alley. Next MOVE members nailed wooden slats across the entire front of the house and fortified the roof, converting the rowhouse into a stockade.

Powerful bullhorns were set up out front, and MOVE members began a series of loud harangues that one resident of the block described as “one profanity after another, with threats against us and everything.” Neighbors said the bullhorns blared as much as 10 hours a day.

In recent weeks, residents of the street became more outspoken. At community meetings and in interviews, they complained of physical attacks by MOVE. Some charged that the Goode administration was doing nothing to solve the community’s problems with the radical group.

Last week, Goode called the situation “very, very explosive,” and hinted that legal action was being prepared to evict the group. But he said he would act only “when I feel there is sufficient legal grounds.”

The previous week, on May 1, the day the neighbors held an emotional news conference, Goode had said, “Our desire is to legally find a way to remove the problem from that block. We do not perceive that there is any violation on which we can make an arrest.”

Goode said then that he could not violate the rights of one group by making an illegal arrest to protect the rights of another.

The first large-scale confrontation between MOVE and police at the Osage Avenue house occurred May 3, 1984, when more than 25 officers briefly faced off with a man holding a shotgun.

The man, whose face was concealed by an executioner’s hood, stood on the roof of the MOVE house for several minutes as police took up positions along the street. One officer, armed with a high-powered rifle, crouched behind a patrol car midway in the block while others, many of them heavily armed and wearing flak jackets, gathered at either end and in the back alley.

The man on the roof did not point the gun at anyone, and went back into the house through a trapdoor.

The officers left the scene, and Capt. John McLees, a police spokesman, said that no crime had been committed. Later that day, Goode said his administration was not “overly alarmed” about the incident.

Also contributing to this article were staff writers Michael B. Coakley, Maida Odom, Howard Goodman, Eric Harrison, Rich Heidorn Jr., Marc Kaufman, Andrew Maykuth, Dick Pothier, David Lee Preston, Tom Torok and Martha Woodall.)

This story was originally published on May 13, 1985.