Every day for the last twelve days the midsummer rains had fallen on the city and life had burst forth in the lush wet heat with an almost tropical fury. On cracked sidewalks grass pushed through the pavement in thick, unruly clumps. Vacant lots had become dense green jungles. The earth that had been frozen so deeply and so long during the winter was now soft and pliable, shifting beneath the feet like something alive. Between the rains the air hung thick and blue, filled with the cries of insects and birds.
In the early morning hours of August 8 the rains stopped. A gentle breeze wafted through west Philadelphia, easing the humidity and cooling the air. Just for a few hours in the darkness it was as if the summer had lifted away from the streets, and beneath it had come just the briefest hint of fall.
Sometime after midnight cops started arriving in the vacant lot that had once been the site of the Philadelphia General Hospital—the hospital that had been the birthplace, forty-five years before, of Vincent Leaphart. They were glad for the break in the weather; it would make the job they had to do a little easier.
It was not often that you could see the police commissioner himself at a police scene at one in the morning, but Joseph O’Neill was there that night. The plan that would begin in the next few hours was unmistakably his own. Like O’Neill, it was organized and logical; there was no room in it for improvisation or indecision.
In contrast to the flamboyance that Frank Rizzo had brought to the commissioner’s job, Joseph O’Neill was a buttoned-down cop. He wasn’t using the job as a stepping-stone to political office. He was a cool professional, with a reputation for being old-fashioned and at times autocratic.
O’Neill hadn’t gone beyond his own expertise and that of his immediate staff to develop the plan. He saw no need to seek the advice of “experts” inside or outside the force; he knew what he was doing. He’d been personally involved in close to a hundred barricade situations. He had put together the Philadelphia stakeout squad—one of the first SWAT teams in the nation. And he’d been an engineer in the military, building bridges and roads under combat conditions. In statements given to the media, the police department later said the plan had been put together in the week since diBona had ordered MOVE’s eviction. But O’Neill had actually begun thinking about the problem some six weeks earlier.
O’Neill approached the problem from an engineering point of view. He began by defining his objectives: first, to remove the children safely from the compound; second, to protect his people; third, to remove the women safely; and last of all, to remove the men.
Police knew the general arrangement of the house’s interior from an interview with a jailed MOVE member. She had described the inside of 309 North Thirty-third Street to police investigators. She wasn’t as familiar with 307, she said, but it was basically the same.
The house was, for all practical purposes, empty. The basement, she’d told them, was one large empty room, with a table in the center and a row of doghouses along the rear wall. The first floor—at the level of the wooden platform—had four rooms, all in a row: the living room/office in the front, a meeting room, a “dog room,” and an office in the rear.
Upstairs were the sleeping areas—one room for mothers with babies, another for couples with babies, and a large room where the others slept. The third-floor attic held more sleeping areas and, in the center, the kitchen.
Armed with this description of the house’s layout, O’Neill had devised a simple strategy. A bulldozer would first tear down the barricade along the sidewalk to gain access to the house itself. Then a cherry picker—a piece of construction equipment with a long hydraulic arm—would be brought into position to knock out the slats across the windows.
A key part of O’Neill’s plan was its reliance on armor. To bring his people into range he devised an armored personnel carrier made out of a yellow dump truck from the Department of Streets. It was an ungainly rolling fortress: the front wheel had a thick steel plate almost covering the entire wheel. On the side that would face the MOVE house, sandbags were piled on the running board. More were stacked on the hood and around the window of the cab, with a tiny slit to enable the driver to see. A thick piece of steel plating some six feet high and ten feet wide was propped in the back, backed up by still more sandbags. He’d devised similar armor for the bulldozer and cherry picker, with sandbags protecting the operators, gas tanks, and other vulnerable parts.
O’Neill wanted no surprises. The police would “telegraph” their every move to the people in the house, informing them over the bullhorn what would happen next. They would use only smoke, no tear gas, both out of concern for the children and so the officers wouldn’t need to use gas masks.
By the time August 8 came, O’Neill was confident—almost arrogant in his low-key way. He had devised no contingency plan; he saw no need. He was sure the plan would work.
3:00 a.m.-6:00 a.m.
Six-and-a-half blocks away from the staging area, the brooding old house on Thirty-third Street was dark and silent except for the barking of dogs. But the people inside were not sleeping. A MOVE supporter had slipped through the blockade during the night to warn them that the police were assembling nearby. They knew the confrontation that had been brewing for a year and a half would come today. Earlier in the night Janine had told a reporter, “Stick around.”
At three in the morning, dozens of police began to arrive in trucks, methodically taking up their assigned positions. Among them were twenty-eight specially selected stakeout cops, whose job it would be to enter the house. They had been chosen because of their physical size.
Cops fanned out into the surrounding buildings to evacuate residents and set up observation posts. They sandbagged windows and rooftop positions and searched the adjacent buildings room by room. Within minutes they controlled an entire city block within the chain-link barricades.
As the press began to realize what was happening, reporters and photographers moved in closer and closer to the MOVE house. But O’Neill wasn’t going to have the media getting in his people’s way during the operation; he herded them into an area surrounded by chain-link fence. He would permit four reporters to move in closer, he told them. They would have to draw lots.
In an apartment building behind the police lines, two officers were escorting the last of the tenants from their second-story apartment.
As they prepared to leave, one of the cops stopped at the window.
“Hey, look at this,” he said to his partner. “It’s a great view.” The window framed the scene outside like a television screen. From this vantage point they could see everything—the cops on the street below crouching in the darkness behind their riot shields, the forbidding barricades across the street, and beyond them, the slatted windows of the MOVE house. It was a ringside seat.
As the door closed behind them on the way out, the shower curtain rustled in the bathroom, a closet door creaked open, and Philadelphia Daily News reporter Kitty Caparella and photographer Norman Lono took up positions by the window. The cop had been right. It was a great view.
The MOVE loudspeaker came on for the first time at 3:50 a.m.
“Testing, murderers. Testing.”
The plan unfolded literally by the numbers. At 4:00 a.m., traffic barriers went up at Thirty-third and Powelton. At 4:20 a busload of police officers pulled up to the same intersection. Within minutes they were joined by thirty-two mounted police, all of them wearing riot helmets and flak jackets.
Inside the barricades a small group of MOVE sympathizers and supporters were already waiting, sitting on benches and milk crates along the fence. Two women—one in dreadlocks and one not—hugged each other in the middle of the street.
Charles (“Chuckie”) Sims Africa came on over the loudspeaker: “Who’s crazy? Tell the world Rizzo killed black babies for a health violation. You think we’re crazy. We ain’t crazy. Every day it’s been raining. Where do you think that rain’s coming from?”
Despite the months of threats coming from the house, the police did not expect trouble. In fact, the cops who’d been tapped to go into the house had been assured by their supervisors that MOVE had no guns in the house; all of them had been removed during the truce at the beginning of the blockade, and no one had been permitted to go into the house since then. They moved into position brazenly, in full view of the MOVE house. A group of them walked up the west side of Thirty-third Street, across the street from the house. The crowd of sympathizers was still at the fence. One of the women taunted the black officers: “You house niggers. You’re too damn scared to tell them you don’t want any part of this murder.”
At 4:50 the armored bulldozer arrived on the back of a truck. A buzz went through the crowd of onlookers and reporters as they realized for the first time what O’Neill had in mind: “They’re going to knock the house down!” The bulldozer sat on the back of the truck, half a block away from the MOVE house, like an actor waiting in the wings.
At 5:05, as MOVE members watched from the darkness of the porch, fire fighters in helmets and orange-and-black raincoats set up water cannons to the west and north of the MOVE house, aiming them carefully at the basement windows. Tow trucks began clearing parked cars. Two police wagons arrived, were waved through the barricade, and came to a stop directly in front of the MOVE house. Cops in riot gear emerged and began moving people away from the fence. Reluctantly the crowd retreated to barricades on Powelton Avenue to await the opening act.
Just after 5:30, as the first hints of light showed in the sky, the bulldozer rolled off the trailer and began creeping toward the fence. Above the low-pitched rumble it was possible to hear the sound of babies crying. As the bulldozer moved closer and closer, Delbert’s voice thundered over the loudspeaker: “You’ve been killing Indian babies for two hundred years. You’ve been killing black babies for two hundred years. You don’t give a fuck about black babies, black men, and black women.”
As Delbert shouted, the bulldozer stopped in the middle of the street in front of the house. It waited, its engine idling. Two MOVE men still stood on the porch, watching.
The sun was up. The drama was about to begin.
At 6:04 Officer Benjamin Powell of the civil affairs unit strode to the middle of the street and stood beside the sandbagged truck. Speaking through a bullhorn, he read the statement prescribed in Step 1 of the plan: “We have in our possession writs of attachments and bench warrants for the occupants of 307-309 North Thirty-third Street. These are court orders issued by Judge G. Fred diBona on August 2, 1978, who has ordered the police to take you into custody.
“Each of you is ordered to surrender immediately. Leave your weapons and come out with your hands extended over your head. You have three minutes to walk to the street.”
Delbert’s voice crackled back: “You’re gonna have to carry us out of this house! We’re not walking out!”
Five minutes later Powell read Step 2:
“You have not surrendered. We are proceeding to tear down the fence.”
The response from the house was silence.
The chugging from the bulldozer became a growl. It clanked across the sidewalk and rammed the fence. The fence shook, but it did not fall. The bulldozer backed up and rammed it again; still it stood. Again the bulldozer advanced, and this time the fence splintered into pieces around the oncoming blade. As it crumbled and fell, rats the size of cats ran from beneath it, across the porch, and into the house.
From within the house came the sound of wailing women and crying babies. Someone shouted, “Long live John Africa!”
One of the men on the porch picked up a large dog and held it in his arms. The other bared his chest. “Come on,” he cried. “Kill me! I don’t have a weapon!”
When MOVE first constructed its barricade/platform, it had built it around a tree, taking care not to disturb its roots. Now the platform and tree fell with a crash as the bulldozer rolled closer to the porch.
The people on the porch ducked inside as the bulldozer crawled over the broken lumber that now littered the shallow front yard. It stopped when it reached the porch itself, but not before the falling debris had hit a corner post, knocking it to a crazy angle and threatening to collapse the entire porch.
Step 2 was complete. Now the plan called for negotiation. Monsignor Charles Devlin, the mediator who had been shuttling between MOVE and the city for months, trying to work out a solution that would prevent this confrontation, took the bullhorn from Powell. He knew the people in the house and felt he had some rapport with them. He pleaded with them to surrender.
The response from the house was swift and harsh. “You motherfucker, you ain’t no priest. We’ll never give up. Explain to them how you stood by and let Rizzo smash a poor black family.”
The kids within took up a chant: “Baby killers! Baby killers!” Powell announced that the police would next remove the barricades from the windows.
The bulldozer had retreated. The cherry picker moved into position, its arm extended before it like an accusing finger. Moving close to the house, it methodically punched out the slatted windows, ripping away not only the slats, but the window frames themselves and the mortar that held them in place.
When it was done, the house looked like a bombed-out shell, with gaping holes where the windows had been.
With the windows gone, it was possible for the first time to see into the house itself. It looked empty. There was no place for anyone to hide inside.
The cops began to relax a little. The operation was almost one hour old. The police had moved against the house, and MOVE had responded by hurling insults, threats, and debris. But nobody had fired a shot.
At 6:55 Powell read Step 4: “Uniformed officers will enter your house for the purpose of taking each of you into custody. Any resistance or use of force will be met with force.”
Commissioner O’Neill, standing at the corner of Thirty-third and Pearl, raised his hand as a signal. Twenty-nine police officers, protected by flak jackets and shields, climbed over the rubble, onto the porch, and into the darkened house. Outside, observers could see flashlights dancing through the upper floors. Within minutes the cops in the house had checked the upper floors, finding no one. All of the people were in the basement of 309.
Suddenly, a small red van from the SPCA appeared out of nowhere and pulled up in front of the house. There were three people in the van, and they either did not realize the danger they were in or did not care. Nonchalantly they got out, carrying their nets, and went to work. They nabbed a black-and-white hound as he ran out of the house. Soon they disappeared into the house, looking for more dogs.
At 7:30 Walter Palmer, another negotiator, tried the bullhorn again. “If you want to come out,” he told the people in the house, “I will request that the police put their guns down.”
“Leave us alone!” they shouted back.
Palmer approached the house with Powell and Police Inspector George Fencl. They walked into the house and tried the door leading to the basement. It was bolted tight, so they raised their voices and talked to the MOVE people through the door.
“What do you want to do?” Palmer asked.
“Leave us alone,” came the reply.
Now the dogcatchers reemerged from the house, carrying more dogs and two orange milk crates full of puppies. Their total catch came to twelve dogs and ten pups. They loaded them all into the van and drove away, their day’s work done.
But still MOVE had not surrendered, so the plan continued. More stakeout officers moved into position behind the barricades on Pearl Street. Powell, now back in position, read Step 5: “We are prepared to pump water into the premises which you occupy.” And they did. Fire fighters turned on the water cannons on Pearl Street, and steady streams of water began pouring through a basement window. Since the windows were only three feet above the basement floor, O’Neill was confident that MOVE members wouldn’t drown, as he put it later, “unless they wanted to.”
It wouldn’t be long now, he guessed. Very soon MOVE would have to come out of the basement. The crisis appeared to be over.
7:55 a.m.
“They’ve got guns! They’ve got guns!”
Stakeout officer John Monahan had been looking into a basement window on the Pearl Street side of the house when he spotted a MOVE member running across the basement with a gun.
The word made its way back among the cops, but it seemed to have little effect. Perhaps it was the fact that the morning had been so uneventful and O’Neill’s elaborate precautions so excessive. Or perhaps they simply found it hard to accept that these people they’d been watching for a year and a half really posed any threat. Many of the cops who’d been manning the barricades saw more of the MOVE people than they did their own kids. They knew them by their first names, had given some of them nicknames. Cops had openly walked up and down Thirty-third Street, in full view of the house, for months. If MOVE members had really meant to cause them harm, they would have had plenty of chances.
So now, despite the armored trucks and the flak jackets and the guns, many of them must have expected this long silly drama to end not with a bang but a whimper—or at worst a volley of four-letter words.
Officer James Ramp was the aide to the stakeout captain. At fifty-two he was one of the old men of the stakeout division. People used to say that captains might come and go, but if you really wanted to know how things were done, you should go find Rampie.
Now, just after eight in the morning, Ramp was glad that this detail would soon be over. His wife had worried about his being on the barricade duty and would be relieved when he retired in a couple of months. He’d had a distinguished career—first in the Marines, where he’d seen combat in World War II and Korea, and afterward on the police force.
He was in a good mood, kidding with the other cops as he leaned against the house next to a window while a fire fighter pried the slats off. Until he’d been assigned to the MOVE detail, he’d been sitting behind a desk for a decade. Now he put his blue riot helmet on backward, going for a laugh. “Look,” he joked with his friends, “I’ve been off the street so long I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Suddenly the muzzle of a gun emerged from a basement window. The cops on the roof raised their rifles to their eyes. Now nobody was joking.
Fire fighters turned on the water cannons. Four minutes later they turned them off again. Just as they did, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter across the street heard three pops. Another reporter spotted a puff of smoke coming from a basement window. There was a brief shocked silence, and then the air was filled with gunfire as dozens of cops opened fire from the alleys and rooftops and barricades. In the midst of the firing, Inspector Morton Solomon shouted an order to retreat.
Earlier in the morning the reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen had moved out of the press bullpen and gradually crept closer to the action, moving up to the very front lines. Now they were caught in the crossfire and, panicked, they tried to run for cover.
“Get down, get down!” police officers shouted. The reporters and photographers dove back to the ground, their cameras and equipment bouncing against the pavement.
The police officers and fire fighters in front of the house scrambled for safety, scurrying on all fours like mice who’ve been surprised in a darkened kitchen. Jim Ramp saw Lieutenant William Krause go down. Braving the gunfire, he ran to drag him to cover.
In the apartment just above him reporter Kitty Caparella was watching the action out the window as she spoke to her editor on the phone. Suddenly she shouted, “Oh, my God! They shot a cop!”
Directly beneath the window James Ramp lay on his back, one knee bent, his riot helmet thrown to one side, his glazed eyes staring up past the reporter and photographer. Blood flowed from both corners of his mouth and pooled beneath his body.
As Krause and Ramp lay beside one another, the gunfire went on and on. It lasted a full minute, but it seemed like forever.
Then suddenly it was quiet again.
Three cops ran to Ramp and Krause. They lifted them swiftly into armor-plated trucks that took them away to area emergency rooms.
William Krause was admitted to Hahnemann Hospital in critical condition with wounds to his abdomen and arm. He would spend weeks in the hospital and lose the use of his right arm for the rest of his life.
James J. Ramp was pronounced dead on arrival at Presbyterian Hospital.
Other officers and fire fighters were also wounded during the gunfire exchange:
1) Police Officer Charles Stewart, with gunshot wounds to the shoulder and neck
2) Police Officer James Hesson, with gunshot wounds to the chest
3) Fireman John Welsh, with gunshot wounds to the neck and hand
4) Fireman Robert Snead, with shotgun pellet wounds to the forehead
5) Fireman Robert Lentine, with shotgun pellet wounds to the forehead
In Powelton Village, the gunfire exchange had destroyed O’Neill’s meticulous plan. Nobody knew what would happen next. They waited, watching the basement windows.
Suddenly a child appeared at the basement window. “My mommy’s dead,” he cried. “Help me, please.” He had blood on his face as he crawled out of the window in a long, mud-soaked T-shirt.
“Come out into the street, son,” a police officer yelled, but the boy just leaned against the house.
“Come into the street.”
“No—you hurt my mommy.”
Still the child stayed at the window, afraid to approach the police. Finally two civil affairs officers carefully climbed onto the porch and moved close to the boy.
“Come over to us.”
He leaned against the house. They reached out and whisked him away from the window.
For five long minutes the police watched and waited. Then they saw a woman holding a baby in the window. “Come on out,” a civil affairs officer shouted. “No one will fire.”
The woman climbed out over the wreckage, holding the infant. Then another woman came out, carrying a child in her arms as another clung to her hip.
The cops who were upstairs inside the house had dived to the floor when the gunfire started. Now they got up carefully and once again checked the upper floors for MOVE members. At the barricades a cop motioned to the front window of the cellar, and fire fighters turned on the water cannon once again. The basement filled rapidly with water. The officers who were closest to the house could see dogs inside, swimming in the deepening water.
They fired smoke grenades through the windows and into the basement. Then through the smoke came more shouts: “Help, help, I’m trying to come out.” Consuella Dotson Africa emerged from the smoke with two more kids. She turned back to pull another child through the window and then spun around, raising her hands over her head. “There’s more babies,” she shouted. “There’s one more.”
Another child emerged, followed by a man holding his hands up in surrender.
At the same time Delbert was crawling out of the side cellar window, his arms spread wide. He surrendered to the same officers who, minutes before, had loaded James Ramp’s body into a police van.
The cops were raging at him. One shoved the barrel of his shotgun under Delbert’s chin. Another swung his helmet, hitting him in the head. As he fell to the ground a third grabbed him by his hair and dragged him across the rough concrete sidewalk. They kicked him in the face and kidneys and groin, so savagely that he could not even shield himself with his hands. He lay there, writhing, as the blows rained down. One cop was swinging so hard he split his shirt down the back.
Finally more cops came and pulled them away as Delbert was loaded into a paddy wagon. Reluctantly the cops went back to their positions.
If they had looked up at the window above their heads, they might have caught a glimpse of a Philadelphia Daily News photographer silently recording it all on film.
By 9:08—less than an hour after the shooting began—tear gas had driven out all of the people in the house. In the confusion nobody was sure how many had been taken into custody; somebody thought Chuckie might still be in the house. The police stayed in position for another half hour, shouting for him to come out. Finally they fired tear gas into the house and entered cautiously. It was empty.
One by one they began handing guns out the basement windows: two .45-caliber military-style pistols, six carbines, two twelve-gauge shotguns, and a Mauser. Forensic studies would later identify one of the carbines as the rifle that killed James Ramp.
When Judge diBona first issued the order authorizing the police to act against MOVE, O’Neill had asked him for authorization to destroy the house. He wasn’t about to leave it standing to become, as he later put it, a “shrine” for MOVE. DiBona granted O’Neill’s request on the legal grounds that the house had been condemned by the city. Now, with everyone removed from the house, O’Neill wasted no time putting the order into effect.
He did, however, wait long enough to permit reporters to tour the house. Those who did reported that it was filthy inside—though it was difficult to say whether that was a consequence of MOVE’s ideology or the fact that it had been cut off from the rest of the world for a year and a half.
For the most part the house was barren. On the second floor was what seemed to be a gym, with a pair of boxing gloves lying on the floor. Milk crates housed a few paperback books.
There was human and dog excrement throughout the house, filling several coffee cans. The reporters did not linger, and they did not descend into the basement.
It does not take long to destroy a house—even one as solid as that massive old Victorian. At noon the bulldozers—this time ordinary ones, with no armor plating—moved onto the lot and advanced toward the already-leaning porch. Their blades cut into the aged brick and gingerbread trim, breaking it into rubble and splinters. The demolition crew did its work methodically, as if it were just another lot, driving the bulldozers back and forth and tumbling the old house into its foundations.
They were finished by two in the afternoon. There was not even a hint of the house left—only the barricades still standing and, where the house had been, a field of raw red Pennsylvania clay.
The DA’s office hadn’t known anything about the demolition. By the time they found out, the house was gone—and they were furious. They had a murder to prosecute, and the police chief had just destroyed most of the evidence that they would need to build their case.
A few hours later a defiant Delbert Africa was brought before Judge Louis Hill on murder charges. “When are they gonna arrest the cop who shot me in the chest and broke my jaw?” Delbert showed no signs of gunshot wounds, and if his jaw was broken it didn’t seem to slow the outpouring of MOVE rhetoric. He continued to thunder at the judge: “People come walking into a peaceful house with guns, they got what they deserved.” MOVE had murdered no one, he said. “What happened was a white racist cop shot the black cop and killed him.”
In the gallery two dozen MOVE sympathizers agreed. “That’s right!” “Right on!” “Racist motherfucker!” They didn’t seem to realize that Ramp had been white.
The shouting from the gallery went on. “They got no right to treat Delbert that way—break his jaw.”
The litany continued as one after another the MOVE members were arraigned. Janine Africa shouted at the judge: “You can’t kill our babies, you asshole. You can’t shoot Chuckie. You can’t judge us, you ain’t no fuckin’ God, you ain’t nothing but a stupid-ass motherfucker—”
Her voice suddenly faltered, but Merle picked up without missing a beat: “You come from the bowels of a backroom bitch.” She turned to a policewoman who’d reached out to restrain her. “Don’t you touch me, you bitch.”
It went on like that for nearly an hour, until the exasperated judge cleared the courtroom of all spectators except the press. The litany continued in the hallway, as MOVE sympathizers talked to reporters about, as one later wrote, “police brutality and the Nazis and what the cops had done to Delbert.”
To this day MOVE contends that no one in the group shot anyone that day. They cite a number of flaws in the prosecution’s case: The gun that killed Ramp bore no fingerprints of MOVE members, and paraffin tests—which show the presence of gunpowder on a suspect’s hands and demonstrate that he or she has recently fired a gun—proved negative. They also cited the fact that Ramp was killed by a bullet that entered the back of his head and traveled downward through his body. If he was facing the window, they ask, how could he have been hit in the back of his head by MOVE gunfire? They point to witnesses who contended that the first shots did not come from the basement but from across the street where police were positioned. And why, they ask, were the guns that were displayed that afternoon so clean when they were supposedly recovered from a basement full of muddy water?
Ramp, they contend, was killed by his fellow cops—whether by accident or design, they do not know, they say. The rifle that killed him was planted in the house to frame MOVE. The house was knocked down to destroy evidence that would implicate police.
In the trial conducted later that year, prosecutors responded to all these contentions. The water in the basement made fingerprint identification and paraffin tests impossible, they say. Witnesses saw Ramp turn away from the window, exposing his back as he rushed to rescue Krause. Other witnesses reported seeing gunfire from the basement window. Fingerprints from the firearms records show that the murder weapon had been purchased by Phil Africa under an assumed name.
The case against the eleven MOVE members is largely circumstantial. Prosecutors admitted they could not prove which of the defendants fired the weapon that killed Ramp—indeed, they could not prove which of them fired a weapon at all that day. These and other questions notwithstanding, the court found all eleven of the defendants guilty of the murder of James Ramp.
At 3:00 the barricades came down. The crowd that had watched the day’s events from beyond the cyclone fences now pressed forward, some angry, some curious, most simply excited at being witnesses—however far removed—to the drama of the day.
As the streets filled up and the shouting became angrier, the police on the scene grew edgy. They ordered the crowd to disperse. “Go home!” they shouted.
The crowd, now numbering close to three hundred, didn’t budge. “We are home!” someone cried back. “This is our home!”
Police Inspector George Fencl strode into the center of the street. Officers in full riot gear, mounted on horses, lined up along one side of the street. The crowd milled angrily, refusing to disperse. The cops and their horses shifted nervously. The crowd and police faced one another, hesitant, expectant.
Someone threw a cherry bomb.
One mounted officer nodded, signaling the others. He spoke calmly, almost casually: “All right.”
Suddenly, in unison, the horses moved onto the sidewalks, sweeping the crowd before them. People jumped aside, falling against the parked cars. Others started throwing bottles at the cops.
The horses moved down the street as other cops, on foot, chased people onto porches and into houses. For a few frenzied minutes it looked as if a full-fledged riot would erupt.
And then it had passed with the swiftness of a summer thunderstorm. The street was empty except for the police and their horses, still twitching nervously from the unaccustomed burst of activity.
As the drama in Powelton Village began to die down, city officials were staging a show of their own across town in City Hall. Rizzo had hastily called a news conference for 4:00 p.m.—late in the day, but still early enough to make the evening news.
It had been a long day for everyone, and with the pressure of the impending deadlines tensions were high on both sides of the microphone.
A long table in the room was filled with guns, all tagged as police evidence. Flanked by Commissioner O’Neill, Monsignor Devlin, and DA Ed Rendell, Rizzo stood behind the table, looking like he hadn’t slept in days. He’d spent the morning visiting the families of the dead and injured cops and fire fighters, and it had put him in a black mood.
The reporters and cameramen adjusted their equipment. It promised to be a classic Rizzo delivery, a verbal boxing match of a press conference, with MOVE as the punching bag.
Rizzo did not disappoint them. It was for people like these that they needed to restore the death penalty, he said. “Put them in the electric chair, and I’ll pull the switch.”
But it wasn’t only MOVE he was after. He was after the reporters as well. As the mayor saw it, the entire incident, including Ramp’s death, was the fault of the press. Throughout the year-and-a-half-long siege, he said, the press had almost openly sided with MOVE’s cause, portraying the police as killers and storm troopers: “What the press has done is glorify a bunch of criminals, and they have put, or tried to put, the police on the defensive.”
Rizzo had a grudge against the press anyway. Over the last several months the papers had been full of reports about police brutality. He was especially ticked off at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which had just won a Pulitzer for an investigative series detailing police beatings and shootings under questionable circumstances. So if Rizzo was defensive about the performance of his cops that day, he had his reasons. “The police showed great restraint. The only person who died was a policeman. The police didn’t kill anybody.”
Rendell added, “Throughout this entire incident the police and the city administration has acted with extremely commendable restraint—some might say there was too much restraint.” (Later, after viewing tapes and photographs, Rendell would change his mind, charging three cops with the beating of Delbert Africa.)
After an opening salvo directed at the press, Rizzo turned the news conference over to O’Neill, but in keeping with his habits he did not sit down. He paced off to one side, occasionally interjecting comments.
O’Neill too was visibly angry. It was a side of him that many of the reporters had never seen before. “The mayor’s been very kind with you,” he began, as if he were lecturing children. “I’ve had it up to here with individual reporters who are constantly our adversaries—constantly.”
As their deadlines approached, the reporters were busy collecting opinions about the confrontation from people throughout the city. At the police headquarters, a cop saw an obvious lesson to be learned from the confrontation: “This goes to show you that you just can’t negotiate with these radicals. They don’t want to listen. They don’t want things solved peacefully. You know they wanted it to end this way. Now these animals will become martyrs, and a good policeman is dead.”
Another added, “There’s no way the police can win in a thing like this. They should have killed all of them.”
Lee Mathis, a black youth of nineteen who lived down the street from the MOVE house, had it figured another way. “They’d never send people like this in to kick out some white people. It’s all part of the city’s move to get black people out of the neighborhood.”
But perhaps it was neighbor Bill Bauman, a thirty-five-year-old carpenter and former Peace Corps volunteer, who best expressed the quandary that many of the Powelton neighbors felt as their ideals clashed with the harsh reality of violent revolution. Like many of the freethinking residents of Powelton, he found himself in the unaccustomed position of defending the police’s action against a group of black radicals.
“It has brought out a lot of ugliness in many of us,” he told a reporter. “Liberalism was put to the test, and it often turned out to be a lot of empty slogans.
“MOVE was like a spoiled child. It acted out unless it got what it wanted, and many of us tried to understand. But you can rationalize bad behavior forever and end up feeling like a fool. I don’t want to rationalize anymore.
“This kind of thing couldn’t happen again here,” he added. “We’ve learned the logic of escalation, and it stinks.”
The police at the scene were finally let off duty at 8:30 that evening. Instead of going home, many of them stopped off at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police that was being held that night. They had plenty of complaints about O’Neill and the police brass—complaints of poor leadership, long hours, and no food, as well as some more serious charges.
One stakeout officer claimed that everything had been under control even after the shooting began, until Deputy Commissioner Solomon ordered them to retreat under fire. That was when Ramp was shot, he said. Another said the cops in the house had “relaxed” after not finding anyone on the first three floors. And, they said—perhaps in reference to the beating of Delbert—cops had been disciplined unfairly for alleged “infractions” during and after the confrontation.
The rank and file weren’t the only ones upset about the plan and how it had been executed. That day police spokespersons portrayed the plan as carefully crafted and thoroughly rehearsed. It had been worked out in detail by O’Neill and his “top aides” at a meeting the previous week, they told reporters. Planning involved not only the police, but also the fire department and even the SPCA. The FBI was kept up to date as well, they said.
But behind this story of unity was the fact that some top police officials felt that the plan had been ill considered and poorly implemented. The cops who went into the house that same day had, in fact, participated in no rehearsals; they hadn’t even been selected until the early morning hours of August 8. And they’d been assured that there were no guns in the MOVE house.
Two days after the assault, Inspector Robert W. Martin of the pistol range—who, along with Inspector Bernard Bartley, had been second in command for the operation—drafted a memo addressed “To Whom It May Concern.” In it he criticized the police operation on several grounds. Among his concerns were these: there had been too many officers inside the house, and they weren’t given the right weapons (he did not elaborate) or the correct protective vests. No action was taken when the guns were first spotted, he wrote. Firemen should not have been used to open the basement windows; in fact, the bulldozer should have knocked off all the basement windows. The Uzis and Ingrams used by the stakeout officers were too inaccurate over the distances involved. The stakeout teams had poor cover in the rear, and there hadn’t been enough men to keep intruders off the roofs. The water cannon should have been operated remotely so that fire fighters and police officers wouldn’t be exposed to gunfire.
At the end of the memo, Martin added a terse postscript with a strong hint of anger, suggesting that O’Neill’s plan did not represent a consensus among the police brass. He wrote:
At a meeting in my office, which Chief Inspector Bridgeford, Inspector Fencl, Inspector Bartley and Captain Taylor attended, I explained to ask me no more questions about equipment to be used or Assault Tactics, because their ideas were completely opposite of mine. On that same day I called Inspector Loftus and was told that I could not get a set of pictures of the MOVE Headquarters. I tried to reach Deputy Commissioner Solomon and was told three (3) times that he was not available.
11 p.m.-Midnight
Whatever the flaws in the plan, whatever the cost in human life and injuries, at least this terrible day was now behind the city. There would be more repercussions, of course—trials of the MOVE members, a trial of the cops who beat Delbert. Over the coming weeks there would be more questions, more news conferences, more articles, more columns, and editorial cartoons. Mistakes had been made; lessons had been learned. But now it seemed that the worst was over. The long, bizarre siege had come to a close. In the end the system had prevailed. The house that John Africa built had fallen.
Late that evening Channel 6 reporter Vernon Odom stood before the empty lot on the corner of Thirty-third and Pearl, getting ready for a live report. Under the glow of the streetlights dozens of onlookers surrounded him. They were subdued, even polite.
Then, as the blinding lights for the camera pierced the darkness, the character of the crowd changed dramatically. Suddenly this restrained group was transformed into an angry mob. As if on cue, a woman began wailing: “Rizzo came down here to kill. Rizzo came down here to kill.” More voices took up the chant. People crowded against the reporter. To the viewers at home it looked like a riot was about to erupt in Powelton Village.
And then Odom signed off, the lights went out, and the crowd’s passion was extinguished as quickly as it had ignited. People drifted away on foot and by car. Kids rode off on their bikes. Within five minutes the crew from Channel 6 found themselves nearly alone on the dark and quiet street.
It was close to midnight by the time they finally packed up their gear and left, leaving the street empty for the first time in a year and a half. A slight glow came from a telephone booth on the corner. Inside, under the flickering fluorescent light, an unknown hand had scrawled, “MOVE 1, Police 0.”