MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy | The Bomb

Description: Former Daily News reporter Linn Washington takes us through his memories of May 13th, 1985, as police use everything in their arsenal to remove MOVE from their Philadelphia headquarters. The attempted eviction culminates in the dropping of a bomb on MOVE’s rowhouse, sparking a fire that killed 11 MOVE members — five of them children — and destroyed 61 homes in Philadelphia.

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[Music]

Voiceover: MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy is a production of Temple University Klein College’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Voiceover: Hey! Rowhome Productions.

Audrey Quinn: Content warning, this series contains description of abuse, trauma, and foul language.

[Music]

Linn Washington, narrating: I was in a deep sleep when the telephone rang at 3 A.M. on May 13, 1985. The caller said, “Linn, it’s going down. Get over here.” I knew immediately what he was talking about, and I was ready. Or at least I thought I was. As I hung up the phone, my wife asked, “What’s happening?” I only had to say one word: MOVE. I dressed and packed a few blank reporter notebooks and pens into my camera bag. Then I got on my motorcycle and rode the ten miles to 6221 Osage Avenue–and straight into hell.

[Gunfire, explosion]

Chris Wagner: Lisa, there has just been a huge explosion here. We don’t know what it means, but it just shook the whole place. Debris flew all over the place. It started a few minutes ago when all the police officers put their helmets on. The firefighters put their- their coats on. There are people screaming around me. I don’t know whether anybody’s hurt or not. A State Police helicopter that had an officer in it with a rifle in his hands came down very low and landed…

[Music]

Linn, narrating: I’m Linn Washington. I’ve been covering MOVE for 50 years. I’m an investigative reporter and a journalism professor at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. This is MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy, a podcast about double standards of justice, a so-called out of control cult, police brutality, and the inequity that underlined it all.

And this is Episode Five: The Bomb.

Linn, narrating: As we heard in the last episode, on May 12th, 1985, Mother’s Day, the city of Philadelphia had ordered all neighbors to leave the 6200 block of Osage Avenue so hundreds of police could arrest four MOVE members on outstanding warrants.

Melba Brisbon: The MOVE people should come out. They should. And I’m glad that somebody is taking action over it right now.

Elliot Rodriguez: You think most people feel that way?

Melba Brisbon, Resident: I think they do. It’s been long enough, you know, that we have to go through something like this.

Linn, narrating: The next morning around 5:30 A.M., the police commissioner issued a final warning for the wanted MOVE members to surrender, and then dozens of police began shooting into the home.

[Gunfire, music]

The sun was just rising as I arrived to that once peaceful middle-class neighborhood. The first thing I saw was cops everywhere. The blocks around Osage were sealed off, but I convinced a few cops to let me through. I parked my motorcycle and started interviewing people. Now I was about two blocks from the MOVE home when I started hearing objects bouncing off the sidewalks.

[Gunfire]

At first I thought it was hail, but there was nothing but blue skies and I quickly realized it was bullets. I put my motorcycle helmet back on and wedged myself underneath a parked car. I was scared. I realized today might be the day I die.

Barbara Grant: Literally, Linn, it was raining bullets. It was raining bullets.

Linn, narrating: Barbara Grant, the News Director at WDAS was stationed not far from me.

Barbara: We had to duck under a car to keep from getting hit with these bullets that were falling out of the sky.

Linn: I know what you mean about the bullets dropping.

Barbara: I mean at that point-I don’t know if you remember that the tape recorders that radio reporters had, but they were these big, clunky boxes, you know, with the, with the big flashlight batteries in them. And we hit the street and my tape recorder banged onto the street and the box that held the batteries flew open. Literally crawling around on the street trying to get my batteries so that we could keep the tape recorder working. It was insane. It was insane.

Linn, narrating: It was a warzone, not an arrest of four MOVE members. Police fired roughly 10,000 rounds of ammunition at MOVE in ninety minutes. At the same time, firefighters hurled nearly 600,000 gallons of water, targeted at MOVE’s makeshift bunker on the roof of the home. They were trying to knock it down and force MOVE members out of the house.

Ramona Africa: The water was just pouring, pouring, pouring down on us in the basement. And I mean, this was not for ten minutes or half an hour. This was for a long time.

Linn, narrating: Ramona Africa would later testify on the attack. She said at this point the family was huddled in the flooded basement. 13-year-old Birdie Africa said the water was followed by missiles of tear gas and smoke.

Birdie Africa, also known as Michael Ward: Tear gas started coming in and we got the blankets and they was wet. And we had them in the bucket and they was wet, and then we put them over our heads and started laying down.

[Music]

Linn, narrating: Hearing the gunfire, I knew the MOVE house was being hit by weapon after weapon. I felt sick imagining what that battlefield-level gunfire was doing to the people inside. Neighborhood leaders had tried to reach out to MOVE.

Dennis Woltering: Well, later this afternoon, Stanley Vaughn and a mother of, a woman thought to be inside went about a half a block away from the MOVE stronghold and tried to talk to them via bullhorn. Mr. Vaughn, what happened?

Stanley Vaughn: Well, we tried to negotiate with the MOVE members inside, but there was no response. We tried to get them to see if they would negotiate with us, the street people on this committee.

Dennis: You tell me you appealed, you pleaded. What did you say on the bullhorn?

Stanley: Well, we told them that they couldn’t win. And, we pleaded with them that, they have children involved. And if they could send the children out, you know, that would, help a little bit, ease the situation.

Dennis: Mr. Vaughn, thank you very much…

Linn, narrating: I ran into three people trying to end this madness: Jerry Africa, a high ranking MOVE member who didn’t live on Osage, the civil rights activist Marcel Randolph, and retired Philadelphia judge Robert “Bobby” Williams. They were desperate to get a hold of Mayor Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s soft-spoken first Black mayor. They said MOVE would be willing to surrender for just a promise to discuss the conviction of the MOVE Nine.

They were frantic, knocking on doors, begging homeowners to use their phones to call. There were no cell phones back then. The Chief Justice of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court tried calling too. But Mayor Goode did not respond. He said he never received these frantic calls. Mayor Goode was in his home office watching it unfold on TV. He was just 30 blocks away, within earshot of the onslaught. but he deferred to his on-scene commanders who continued the madness. He appeared to do nothing to stop it.

The whole front of the house at 6221 Osage Avenue was blown off during the morning shootout. MOVE only had a small number of weapons: two pistols, two shotguns, and a .22 caliber rifle, and it’s not even clear if all of them even worked. The police had armored vehicles. But the police would later say they feared that MOVE would shoot at them from their fortified rooftop bunker if officers attempted to storm the home.

[Music]

And this is when the Philadelphia police reached further into their deadly arsenal. A few months earlier, without following any official procedures, an FBI agent made an unusual delivery to the Philadelphia Police Bomb Squad: 38 pounds of C-4, a very powerful explosive typically used by the military.

Around 5 P.M. that Monday, I was finally taking a break a couple of blocks from the scene. I was sitting near a State Police helicopter going through my notes, when I saw three men come out, one carrying a green satchel. They climbed into the helicopter, started its engines. The blades began to spin and it took off towards the MOVE home.

[Helicopter whirring]

At 5:27 P.M., without any warning to the MOVE members, no last chance surrender, no get out while you can. While the helicopter hovered over the home, a Philadelphia police officer dropped a two-pound satchel bomb on the residence.

[Explosion]

The goal was to destroy the fortified bunker on top of 6221 Osage Avenue. Some police, city officials and even reporters would later call what was dropped an “incendiary device.” But let’s be clear, it was a bomb. C-4 explosives are designed for maximum destruction. They are deployed to destroy things; in this case, the seven adults and six children inside the MOVE home.

Gregore Sambor: I decided that an explosive device should be used and that it should be dropped from a helicopter.

Linn, narrating: This is Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor.

Sambor: The use of the device itself gives me the least pause. It was selected as a conservative and safe approach to what I perceived as a tactical necessity. I was assured that the device would not harm the occupants.

Linn, narrating: A “tactical necessity?” To settle a housing issue with, again, seven civilian adults and six children? Pete Kane, the Channel 10 Videographer was still in the house up the street from the MOVE home, and he had just left his perch at the upstairs window to get a snack.

Pete Kane: I went down to the kitchen to get a cold pork chop and a Pepsi and the house shook. And I’m looking out the window and I see the smoke coming out of the MOVE house. I went back upstairs, I called the station, “What the heck just happened?”

Linn, narrating: And then there is fire.

Pete: I knew what a fire could do. And the black smoke came out, it was coming out of 6221 Osage Avenue. I’m on the phone live with Larry Kane on the air. And I said, “Larry, the fire is spreading. It’s not just the MOVE house, it’s either-the homes on either side are starting to burn.” And I’m telling him on the air, I said, “The fire is spreading. The fire is spreading.”

Linn, narrating: I was three blocks away when the bomb hit. My knees buckled from the sheer force of its impact. The bomb did not immediately destroy the bunker on the roof of 6221 Osage Avenue. It was made with heavy timber, railroad ties and a deck plate.

But it did ignite what we later learned was a five gallon can of gasoline that was on the roof. Police knew it was there. The fire looked like a barbecue grill starting up. At first, I saw just a little whiff of black smoke and then the yellowish brownish green smoke, then the big blaze on the house and the fire jumping across roof lines.

Harvey Clark: I’m still not seeing any fire trucks at all from our vantage point…

[Music, midroll]

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Linn, narrating: Throughout the day, fire trucks had been on the scene to shoot water into the MOVE home. But now, they sat idle. There was no attempt to put out the growing fire, even as it spread to neighboring homes.

Larry Kane: This is a inferno of epic proportions, and it’s got to be more than five alarms. The fire commissioner is on the scene. We don’t know if Philadelphia firefighters are declining to fight the fire. We do know that for security reasons, according to the mayor, the firefighting effort was delayed. And we saw that with our very eyes, as Pete Kane described to us…

Linn, narrating: Another decision by Police Commissioner Sambor, in case the bomb itself wasn’t enough, he wanted to use the fire as a “tactical weapon” to destroy the bunker.

Sambor: I made the recommendation. And it was concurred in with the-by the fire commissioner.

Linn, narrating: Fire as a weapon is a technique often used in wars. Sambor believed that MOVE’s bunker must burn, so he let it burn–as desperate neighbors cried, “Fight the fire, damn it! Fight the fucking fire!”

Diane Allen: Well Jerry, we understand the fire is now five alarms, still raging out of control. As you can see, flames jumping 60ft, maybe 100ft up into the air.

Linn, narrating: And at that time, Mayor Wilson Goode agreed with it.

Wilson Goode: The reason and the difficulty with the fire department fighting the fire is that we know that there are MOVE members in the alleyway back there with guns, and we are concerned about the protection of the firefighters. And I want to say to all the people, that as the mayor of this city, I stand fully accountable for having made that decision.

Linn, narrating: By the time Sambor decided to fight the fire there was little water pressure left.

Pete Kane, archival tape: They’re-they’re fully involved in flames right now. That whole block is up in flames, you know, right now. But the debris is coming this way. It’s hitting the rooftops, you know, right now…

Linn, narrating: The city had dropped roughly 467 tons of water on the MOVE home before dropping the bomb. Another complication was a four-alarm fire in Southwest Philadelphia at the same time.

Harvey Clark: That adds up to a whole lot of water. And folks on this street in the 6200 block of Locust are saying that they almost have no water pressure in their homes…

Linn, narrating: Pete Kane stayed in the same rowhome in sight of Osage for three more hours and watched the fire consume the block.

Pete: My station was concerned with my safety. They told me, “Get out of there, get out of there.” I went out the back door and down the-down the alley, crossed over. I looked back and that’s when I realized Pine Street was an inferno.

Linn, narrating: It took a full hour for any water to be sprayed on the growing inferno and roughly four hours before firefighters vigorously began attacking the fire.

Harvey: It’s-it’s all out of control. There is no signs of any water from-from our location. Now, we are on the north side. At this point, we see no firefighters here…

Linn, narrating: Meanwhile, the 13 MOVE members are trapped inside 6221 Osage Avenue. They are now in the basement, desperate to find a way out.

Ramona Africa: And the instant that we could be seen trying to come out, the cops immediately started shooting at us.

Linn, narrating: That’s MOVE member Ramona Africa who was inside 6221 Osage Avenue.

Ramona: You could hear the bullets hitting all around us, forcing us back into the burning building. This happened a number of times, at least twice. Started getting so bad in there with the fire spreading quickly, you know, and the smoke, that you’re faced with a situation where, you know, you’re either gonna be burned alive or possibly shot to death.

Linn, narrating: Police strongly deny shooting at fleeing MOVE members. Reporter Pete Kane says that while he was across the street from the MOVE home, he heard the “pop pop” of police gunfire aimed at the MOVE home as the fire blazed.

[Gunfire]

Pete: The SWAT guys that were here, they started breaking into the houses right there to get access to the back of the driveway. And I hear them saying, “They’re coming out the back, they’re coming out the back.” Minutes later, I hear, “Pow pow pow pow pow, pow pow pow.”

Linn: So you actually heard gunfire coming from the rear of the…

Pete: Coming from the right side. Coming from the right side Osage Avenue. I could hear the gunfire coming from the rear. And the fire was burning out of control then.

Linn, narrating: At 7:30 P.M., Ramona and 13-year-old Michael “Birdie” Ward Africa tried to escape again.

Ramona: The adults were hollering out that we were coming out. We were bringing the children out.

Linn, narrating: At this point most of the people in the MOVE house were still alive. John Africa was killed earlier in the day. The temperature in the burning rowhome had soared to over 2000 degrees. Birdie said the children wanted to come out, but police continued to fire at the back of the house. It was virtually impossible for them to flee the inferno. Three officers said a man carrying what they believed was a gun out of the MOVE home shot at them, but Birdie said he was carrying out nine-year-old Tomaso Africa, not a gun.

Birdie Africa/Michael Ward: He opened the thing, and had Tomaso and was taking him out. And then they started shooting again. And then they brought him back in.

Linn, narrating: In the months after the bombing, Philadelphia police officer James Berghaier said he was haunted by this moment. He said he witnessed Birdie and Ramona leave the house and he wanted to help them. His fellow officers tried to stop him, calling it a “trap.” But he did not let it stop him from helping the child.

James Berghaier: So I ran out and I scooped him underneath his left arm. I’ll never forget it. The first thing he said to me is, “Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me.”

James Berghaier, archival tape: He then started to say, say to me that “I’m hungry. I want something to eat. I’m hungry.”

James Berghaier: That’s the part I have a hard time with. What this kid went through. “I’m hungry?” After he went through all that, “I’m hungry?”

Linn, narrating: Louise James was there too, despite losing her home, being harassed by MOVE, and having her son, Frank, attempt to kill her on her brother John Africa’s orders. She says she tried to save them.

Louise James: I was saying to these cops, my son is in there. I’ve got to get to my son. I’ve got to get to my son. But in spite of the fact that they knew this was a mother trying to reach her child, these cops picked me up, one under each arm. Drug me, drug me back behind the barricade, picked me up and threw me. Just threw me behind the barricade.

Linn, narrating: Ramona and Birdie were the only MOVE members to make it out of the house. Killed was MOVE founder John Africa, Theresa Brooks Africa, Frank James Africa, Raymond Foster Africa, James Conrad Hampton Africa, and Rhonda Ward Africa. And all of the remaining children: Tomaso Levino Africa, Delisha Orr Africa, Zanetta Dotson Africa, Phil Phillips Africa, and Katricia Dotson Africa.

Maida Odom: It was the moment that I got over being selfish and thought about the people in the house. Because up to then I was trying to save my own life. I wasn’t prepared to die for The Philadelphia Inquirer or MOVE or anybody else. Okay? And I don’t separate the MOVE members from the MOVE children, nobody–there is no crime for which the penalty is being shot at, water cannoned, bombed, and burned up. No crime.

Linn: Inquirer Reporter Maida Odom, who’d spent over 20 hours on the scene, was home when the bomb was dropped and the fire burned. But I was still there. As the night went on, I was a couple blocks away, watching along with many Osage Avenue and Pine Street neighbors as their beloved homes burned.

Janice Walker: I want to know who’s going to replace it now.

Dennis Woltering: Did you…

Janice: My family and all of their dreams, all of their aspirations are tied up in that house.

Dennis: When you moved out last night, what did you think would come today?

Janice: We were hoping that there would be a peaceful settlement and that they would move out, and that we would be able to live like normal human beings. We’ve had enough of this. It’s been over three and a half years now.

Alverita Spain: When you work hard for what you have, I mean actually work hard, you know, to get what you have. You don’t want to see it, you know, lost like this.

Linn: But I heard that there were some people still in the houses on Pine Street, elderly people, blind people, deaf people, and I made a decision to put my non-involvement duty as a reporter aside and help get people out of there.

[Music]

It was so darn hot in the alleyway between Pine Street and Osage Avenue, my skin was boiling. It was surreal. I saw a homeowner with a gun. I told him I was a reporter and offered to help. He said, “I don’t give a fuck. Get out of here!” So I eased on out, I didn’t turn my back on that dude. But that man and others were protecting their homes from looters as the homes were burning down around them. It’s now a six-alarm fire and tempers of neighbors and the community flare.

Unidentified: Why don’t you all stop me from forming the goddamn house? All right, listen to what I’m saying…

[Music]

Linn, narrating: Anger was rising. Neighbors were blaming the police and their brutal history of harassing Black Philadelphians. Others blamed Mayor Goode and city officials.

Unidentified: We want Mayor Goode. We want Mayor Goode. We want him to come out here and put a stop to this mass murder. That’s what it is, mass murder.

But as Monday turned into Tuesday some residents, unable to attack those they felt were responsible, turned their anger towards us, the reporters. News organizations began withdrawing their white reporters in order to protect them and leaving Black and the one Latino reporter to continue the reporting as Tuesday went on. My color was no defense in that toxic stew.

The Black and brown reporters who stayed now faced the brunt of community anger. Folks raged against me for working for the “white media.” I left the scene at 2 P.M. on Tuesday May 14th, exhausted.

Tyree Johnson: It was upsetting. And, because, you know, I knew a lot of those people across the street. We were good neighbors.

Linn, narrating: That’s Tyree Johnson again, who lives across the street from the Pine Street homes that burned. He also covered the disaster as a Philadelphia Daily News reporter.

Tyree: The devastation just was just overwhelming. Someone had, asphalt, tile on the front, and it melted. And one neighbor had a car, that, changed colors from the heat. You know, like that, I think that we even had a tree that caught fire on this side.

Linn, narrating: The fire destroyed sixty-one homes, leaving 250 people homeless. Tyree took his daughter outside to walk with him through what was once a thriving middle-class neighborhood of families, barbecues and folks looking after each other.

Tyree: It looked like the Roman ruins. And there was only one house standing. And that was the very last house here. But they had to tear that down.

Linn, narrating: His daughter Tyra, who was 13, cried as they walked.

Tyree: There was no doors left to go through. It was just, you know, the-the whole thing was just raggedy. They blew the whole thing. I think–I really believe that, MOVE wanted the confrontation. But I don’t think they knew it was gonna happen like that. And they pushed all the right buttons, only to push really one wrong one.

Linn, narrating: In total, I spent nearly 30 hours around Osage Avenue over those two days. I watched the flames consume 6221 Osage Avenue and incinerate the adults and children inside. I watched the out of control fire destroy a tight community living their dream. It was a dystopian hellscape.

I was drained, confused, and enraged. I was angry at the police, City Hall, MOVE, and mad at myself because I couldn’t do anything. It was crazy rage, and so much more was to come.

[Music]

In the next episode of MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy.

Carl Singley: The fact of the matter is no human beings should have been the subject of that type of assault.

Gregore Sambor: It remains a fact that if MOVE members had simply come out of the building, they would be alive today. Property damage would have been minimal and we would not now be gathered. But they announced that morning that they would never surrender and that they would kill as many of us as they could.

Wilson Goode: I don’t think there’s anything that happened in that process that was, I could say, was something that I ever would have approved.

Pam Africa: We’re still fighting for life. We’re still fighting for political prisoners. And I think as long as we’re doing that, we’re still doing MOVE work.

Audrey Quinn: MOVE: Untangling the Tragedy is a production of Temple University Klein College’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Linn Washington is our Producer and Host.

Our Executive Producer, Field Producer, and Script Writer is Yvonne Latty, the Director of The Logan Center.

The Podcast Editor is Audrey Quinn.

Our Inquirer Editor is Daniel Rubin, the Senior Editor for Investigations.

Sound design, scoring, mixing, and mastering by Rowhome Productions.

Rowhome’s Creative Director is Alex Lewis. John Myers is Rowhome’s Executive Producer.

Our Associate Producer, Tape Assembly, and Lead Researcher is Natalie Reitz.

Original Music is by Royce Hearn.

Our Data Editor is Colin Evans.

Our Podcast Art is by Layla Jenkins.

Production Assistants Allison Beck and Nicole Barbarito.

We used the MOVE archives of Temple University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.

Thanks to Josue Hurtado and John Pettit of the Center for their support facilitating our endless requests.

This episode used sounds from WCAU, KYW, WPVI, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Funding support comes from The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Temple University’s Humanities and Arts Award, Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communication, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Special thanks to the Dean of Klein College, David Boardman.

We are also grateful to Matt Curtius of Temple’s Tyler School of Art and Design and Jack Klotz of Klein College’s Media and Production Department and Audio & Live Entertainment Major.

Go to sinomn.com to check out archival stories on MOVE and more. Subscribe, download, review and share.

I’m Audrey Quinn. Thanks for listening.

Voiceover: Rowhome Productions.