Eight Dead in Brooklyn While Permits Kept Rolling

Eight people are dead in Brooklyn, including a 9-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, after a three-story apartment building collapsed Wednesday afternoon while construction crews dug in the lot next door. The fire department ended rescue operations Thursday after the last victim was pulled from the wreckage. Eighteen more were injured, four of them firefighters.

The paper trail came out almost immediately. A stop work order was issued at the adjacent site in March after inspectors concluded the building there was being demolished without adequate overhead protection, such as netting to shield neighboring buildings. In April, inspectors found demolition had resumed in violation of that order. The Department of Buildings says work was allowed to continue once the problems were corrected. By September, a contractor had notified the city that excavation would begin and include rock blasting. Permit applications indicated plans to dig below 15 feet. Two days ago, the building next door came down.

Who Warned Them

The people living beside the pit say they saw this coming. Dervie Mapp, who lives along the construction site, said she and her neighbors complained for months about the project. Her landlord brought engineers into the building, but residents never received an inspection report, she said. A woman in a neighboring building said she and fellow residents blamed vibrations from the construction for cracks that appeared in their apartment walls.

James Williams, who works at a deli across the street, heard loud banging at the site all day Wednesday. He looked outside and saw bricks falling. "Two minutes later, the building collapsed," he said. When the facade crumbled and exposed the neighboring building, he spotted a woman on a staircase. "There wasn't anything I could do," he said, his voice cracking.

Who Gets Crushed

The dead were Nicole Daniela Salvada Rodriguez, 9; Juan Daniel Salvada Guzman, 31; Kevin Santiago Reyes Gonzalez, 10; Ndiaye Mamadou, 31; Barry Mamadou, 23; Gabriel Siguencia, 22; Edgar Sapon, 26; and Jose Luis Caguana Cosquillo, 26. Some were from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Trinidad, the mayor said. Two of the dead were construction workers.

Carlos Caguana said his brother José was working at the site and had a pregnant wife and a young child. "He was the sole provider for the family," he told WNBC-TV. The man who dug the hole and the family living beside it ended up under the same rubble.

What People Actually Did

Before the official machinery caught up, the people nearby were already moving. Customers and stylists at a nearby hair salon ran onto the sidewalk when the building fell. Hairstylist Brigitte Anama saw emergency workers pulling people from the rubble, including what appeared to be a child. "People were saying, 'Pray for the baby, pray for the baby,'" she said. Some workers who survived joined firefighters in digging out survivors, the mayor said. Responders used power saws and pickaxes to cut through debris, and firefighters pulled a pregnant woman from the wreckage and rushed her to an ambulance.

What They're Calling "Accountability"

Now come the promises. Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered inspections at about 100 building sites involving companies related to the project. The Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation. "If there is anyone, or any entity, operating in this city that bears responsibility for what happened, we will hold them fully accountable," Mamdani said at a news conference.

Investigators haven't determined a cause. Glenn Corbett, a construction safety expert at John Jay College, said it's way too early to know. "It could be a design flaw, it could be a construction flaw, or it could be some kind of work that was going on," he said, adding that the shoring of the excavation appeared to have failed. Phone and email messages left with one of contractor Mordechai "Marty" Waisbrod's Brooklyn-based businesses went unanswered, as did messages for the engineer, Jieming Wang, and for an inspector listed on the project.

This is the second high-profile structural failure in New York in about four months. In July, several Manhattan buildings were evacuated after support columns buckled inside a skyscraper that once was Pfizer's headquarters. Every one of those permits, inspections and sign-offs existed before the bricks fell.