All night, since the first word of the evacuation had gone out, the watchers had been gathering: reporters, photographers, television correspondents and cameramen, neighbors and relatives, would-be mediators, community activists, and rubberneckers. They pressed against the police barricades, hundreds of them, badgering the cops for news, any news, about what was happening on Osage Avenue.
From the darkness beyond the barricades came the sounds of activity—men moving about, trucks arriving, equipment being moved into place. As it had throughout the night, the sounds of MOVE members on the bullhorn and their monotonous litany of four-letter words droned in the background. At the barricades, the onlookers peered into the gloom, waiting for dawn.
By dawn it was no longer a neighborhood.
On both sides of Osage Avenue, along Pine and Addison, up and down Sixty-second Street and Cobbs Creek Parkway the houses stood silent.
On the corner of Sixty-second and Osage the heavy diesel engines of the fire trucks throbbed, pressurizing the water for the SQRTs.
In the alleyway entrances at each end of the block, the insertion teams shouldered their gear and shifted uneasily.
In the five police posts surrounding the house, stakeout officers checked their weapons.
On the rooftops police spotters peered over sandbags, watching the gun ports on the MOVE bunkers.
Crouching behind his sandbags, on the sun porch of a house across the street from MOVE, at least one stakeout officer figured this was going to be 1978 all over again. When this day was over, cops would surely be dead—and as far as he was concerned, it would be the fault of the Philadelphia Police Department brass.
His mind wandered back to the early morning hours, when he and the other cops in his post had moved through the narrow walkway behind the houses. It had been barely three feet wide; even walking single file it had been a tight squeeze between the high wooden fences on either side.
That was one of only two ways out of the house he was in. The other was through the front door—out into Osage Avenue and MOVE’s direct line of fire.
What would happen, he asked himself, if someone in this house took a bullet? There were no paramedics or first-aid supplies in the house—not even a stretcher. He couldn’t shake the image of a screaming, bleeding cop being carried out the back door and down that long walkway, loaded like firewood on the shoulders of his buddies.
That wasn’t all. Captain Kirchner told the men that there’d be sandbags. There were sandbags, all right; when he stood up they came just about to his knees. If he crouched down, he could protect himself up to his waist. As for the rest, he was exposed—and if those bastards in the front bunker could see him as well as he could see the bunker, he was going to be a perfect target.
At the west end of the alley behind Osage Avenue, Bill Klein of insertion team A was thinking about real estate.
Not that he wanted to; he just couldn’t get it out of his head. He’d been selling real estate on the side for some time, and he’d decided to go for his broker’s license. The state exam was just five days away, and Klein had begun hitting the books pretty hard.
Now, despite the armed militants he was about to face, despite the machine guns poking from the stakeout posts, despite even the bag full of explosives that hung from his waist, he was thinking about what he needed to know to pass his exam.
A real estate agent might sell 6223 as a “starter home”—show it to a young couple, probably black, no kids, a couple of civil service jobs between them. You’d call the house “solid”—with the kind of construction and attention to detail you don’t see in your newer homes. The sun porch would be a big selling point—especially the fanlight glazing across the top—and it might distract them from the tiny kitchen and dining nook that were crowded side by side in the back of the house.
Upstairs you’d have a master bedroom in the front and two small bedrooms in the back. In between, in the center of the house, would be a bathroom. Closet space would be a problem.
At 6:00 a.m., the sun rose red on this warm and humid day.
In the minutes after dawn there was still no sound except the pulsing of the fire department diesels. And then, precisely at six o’clock, came a harsh, metallic call:
“Attention, MOVE! This is America! You have to abide by the laws of the United States!”
Crouching behind the sandbags on the still-dark sun porch of 6218 Osage Avenue, Commissioner Sambor read the words off a yellow tablet without a hint of irony. It sounded as though he’d had trouble getting the wording right, had worked over his opening like an amateur toastmaster preparing for a retirement party. The phrases did not flow; they lurched along in staccato bursts of police report prose:
“This is the police commissioner. We have warrants for the arrest of Frank James Africa, Ramona Johnson Africa, Theresa Brooks Africa, and Conrad Hampton Africa for various violations of the criminal statutes of Pennsylvania.
“We do not wish to harm anyone. All occupants have fifteen minutes to peaceably evacuate the premises and surrender. This is your only notice.
“The fifteen minutes start now.”
From his vantage point in Post 2, Officer Ed Furlong watched through binoculars as two black men in dreadlocks scurried across the roof of 6221 and disappeared into the front bunker. They walked bent over, as if they were carrying something heavy in each hand.
Sambor had barely finished reading his statement when he was answered by the amplified voices of MOVE:
“Come and get us, motherfuckers. But you better be sure your insurance is paid up! You be sure you call your wives and families, ‘cause you ain’t coming home! You come in this house, ‘cause we got something for you!”
Another voice broke in: “You’re going to be laying in the street! Come on in and get us! We’ll kill you where you stay; we’ll kill you where you lay! We see you on the roof. We know you’re in those houses.
“You remember 1978? You ain’t leaving this street alive. You gonna die out here!”
The harangue went on and on. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended. Again the street was silent except for the throbbing bass of the diesels.
Sometime in the night thirteen-year-old Birdie Africa had been roused from a troubled sleep by the sound of amplified voices. He heard glass breaking and Ramona’s voice over the loudspeaker: “Did you all hear that? We’re putting gas in all these houses. If one house get it, all of these houses are going to get it.” Eventually he’d fallen back into a doze to the sound of the other adults putting out information over the loudspeaker.
Now, at dawn, he heard Sambor’s voice as the adults came to him. They gathered up Birdie and the other children from the second-floor hallway where they’d been sleeping and led them down into the cellar.
At the back of the cellar was what had originally been the house’s garage. Now it had been sealed off from the alley by cinder blocks, with a single fortified hatch that was just big enough for one person to climb through. At the other end of the garage was a door leading into the rest of the basement.
The women led the children through that door and into the sealed garage. Inside it was pitch black and musty. The women and children lay down on the cool cement floor and pulled wet blankets over themselves to protect them from tear gas.
By an odd coincidence, the house at 6217 Osage Avenue belonged to a detective on the police force, and he’d given Connor a front door key earlier that morning. He’d been worried about the damage that might be done to his house, and Connor had reassured him that they’d keep it to a minimum. In fact, he’d promised to take all the pictures off the wall so they wouldn’t fall and break. At least the key would help them get into the house quickly, Connor thought as he and his team waited for the signal to begin.
At 6:15 the first smoke grenades were fired. Within seconds dense white smoke filled the street and alley and thousands of gallons of water flooded across the rooftops. One stream arced south from the SQRT on Pine Street, pounding against the rear bunker. The second, coming from Sixty-second Street, fell short of the bunkers by a hundred feet. Most of it rained down into the eastern alley and landed on the heads of Ed Connor and the men in insertion team B.
Soaking wet, weighted down with Uzis, explosives, and the pepper fogger, Connor’s team started down Osage Avenue. In the gloom and smoke they could barely make out the steps jutting from the doorways onto the sidewalk. They stumbled past, keeping count so they would know when they reached 6217. They were halfway there when the first shot rang out.
Connor and Officer Salvatore Marsalo raced through the smoke to the stoop of 6217. As Marsalo provided cover, Connor used the key provided by the owner to unlock the door. The rest of Team B—Officers James Muldowney, Daniel Angelucci, Salvatore Marsalo, Jesse Freer, Alexander Draft, and Michael Ryan—crowded through the narrow doorway as Connor peered into the smoke, looking for the source of the gunfire. And then they were all inside and Connor was on the radio with Marandola.
“Team B to Post l—we’re inside 17.”
Frank Powell and the other six men of insertion team A were moving east in the alley behind Osage Avenue. As they stepped into the mouth of the alley, it was as if they had left behind the spring morning in Philadelphia and arrived in an alien world. The houses to their left were dim in the haze and the darkness. Ahead was a sheet of roaring water from the SQRTs, looking as if someone had taken the alley and put it at the base of Niagara Falls.
And behind that wall of water were people who were shooting at cops. Maybe them.
In line behind Powell, Jim Berghaier could just make out the fence behind 6221. MOVE had built the fence—six feet high and solid inch-thick planks—across the width of the alley when the organization had moved in. Now, with their threats still ringing in his ears and the gunshots coming from the MOVE house, Berghaier realized that anyone on the other side of the fence had a clear shot at them—and could take Team A down like bowling pins.
“Tear gas!”
Mellor, just ahead of Berghaier, pressed his large frame against the brick rear of one of the row houses. He too had seen the fence—and like Berghaier, he realized he was at the mercy of anyone on the other side. Now, exposed and vulnerable, he had to stop, shoulder his rifle, and adjust his mask. Despite the petroleum jelly, the gas burned his hands and neck.
There wasn’t supposed to be any tear gas, he thought. According to the plan, there’d be smoke but no tear gas.
Nobody was behind the fence. Team A reached the back door of 6223 Osage without incident, forced it open, and entered the basement laundry room. By now the gunfire was intense.
If anyone had still hoped that the SQRTs could knock the bunkers off the roof, they knew better by now. Firemen and policemen had brought the second SQRT around to Pine Street. Side by side like a pair of long-necked cranes, the two of them pummeled the rooftop of 6221, blasting down tarps and pallets, sweeping loose lumber and debris onto Osage Avenue, the roar of their compressors combining with the sound of rushing water to make a steady white noise that carried to the streets beyond. In the last fifteen minutes they had thrown thousands of gallons of high-pressure water against the bunkers. The bunkers hadn’t budged an inch.
In the relative safety of 6217 Osage, Ed Connor was keeping a promise he’d made to the man who owned the house. One by one he took the pictures off the living room wall and laid them carefully on the floor. Muldowney and Angelucci were in the tiny dining room preparing a charge to breach the plywood partition that separated the sun porches of 6217 and 6219.
They worked deliberately. There was no rush. On a piece of cardboard about three feet square they laid down a rectangular loop of det cord. Then they looped it around twice more and attached a fuse.
Connor, done with his housekeeping, raised Post 1 on the radio and told Marandola they were ready to proceed. Then he carried the charge into the sun porch, taped it against the partition, and set the fuse. He and his men crouched behind the sofa and waited.
By now, throughout the rest of the city, another workweek was beginning. The weather report called for sunny skies, with highs near ninety.
The first explosion of the day came at 6:18. It rained down plaster on the heads of Connor’s men and blew the glass out of the windows in 6217 Osage. As the plaster dust began to settle, Connor crept onto the porch and peered through the hole into 6219.
Inside, the dust filled the air so densely that he could hardly see across the sixteen-foot-wide house. At this hour the weak morning light barely penetrated the drapes across the sun porch windows. On the other side of the porch, the partition adjoining the MOVE house had a hole in it that matched the one his men had just blown. Connor figured the force of the explosion must have blown the first partition across the porch and into the other side.
He peered into the dark interior of 6219. It seemed to be empty. Carefully he began to climb through the hole. It did not occur to him until much later that the drapes to the sun porch had been open the night before.
The mayor stepped out from his kitchen. From his back porch he could hear gunfire and the sound of explosions. He would later say that “it sounded like a war zone out there.”
In the basement of 6223, Frank Powell’s team could hear the water pounding against the roof, pouring through the second-floor skylight, and raining onto the bathroom floor. They had secured the house—checked it from top to bottom—and regrouped. Klein prepared the downstairs charge.
Klein had already placed a large charge on the living room wall on the side opposite the MOVE house. If need be, they could detonate the charge and escape into 6225. Now he placed the jet-tapper high on the basement wall, just below the steps. The idea—the only part of the plan that came from the FBI agents—was to put the charge in an area where it wouldn’t be likely to harm anyone on the other side. When it was done, they waited. The plan called for them to wait until Team B had successfully breached the eastern wall of the MOVE house.
On the other side of the MOVE house, Connor was stepping through the hole when MOVE opened up on him.
Later Muldowney would estimate that the gunfire came from at least three locations—from the sun porch of the MOVE house, along the baseboard where it joined 6219, and from the top of the stairs in 6219. To him it looked and sounded like buckshot and .22-caliber rifle fire.
Pinned down by the gunfire, the men saw Connor turn and dive back through the opening. The partition splintered around him as bullets ripped into it.
“I’m hit!” Connor cried as he slammed to the floor. “I can’t move!” Freer sprayed machine gun fire toward the MOVE house and dragged Connor into the living room of 6217.
“I can’t move my legs!” Connor shouted. Freer looked at Connor’s back. A single bullet hole had pierced the jumpsuit, right over his spine.
As the pain subsided, Connor found that he could indeed move his legs. His spine—and, most likely, his life—had been saved by his protective vest. Later that day the forensics guys would dig a flattened .38-caliber slug out of the vest. Connor escaped with a bruise the size of a half-dollar.
Some minutes later, after Connor was feeling better, the assault on 6219 began again. Team B threw more flashbangs into the hole, but the firing went on. Connor took aim with his Uzi at the porch bunker, where the heaviest firing seemed to be coming from, and opened fire. The other men in the team also returned fire, taking turns to conserve their ammunition. A woman’s scream came from inside the bunker, but the firing went on.
Connor fired at the bunker again. The screaming stopped. But the gunfire continued.
“Get the C-4,” Connor said.
The team had regrouped in the living room of 6217. The firing from the MOVE house had stopped, but they knew it would begin again the minute they showed themselves. Connor was ready to go to heavier ordnance.
He told Angelucci and Muldowney to rig a block of C-4—a 1 1/4-pound brick about the size of a quart of milk—with a six-second fuse. They looked at one another: a pound and a quarter was a lot of plastic. Properly placed, it was enough to drop the whole house and bury them.
Connor didn’t call Marandola. “I’ll take responsibility,” he told the team. Still Angelucci and Muldowney hesitated. “I said I’ll take responsibility,” he repeated.
When they were finished, Muldowney handed the charge to Connor. “You throw it,” Connor said.
“You wanted it—you throw it,” Muldowney answered.
“I’m ordering you to throw it,” Connor said. “I told you I’ll take responsibility.” Minutes later, despite his better judgment, Muldowney found himself lying in the living room, his head pointed toward the sun porch. Angelucci crouched over him, his gun aimed at the partition. As the others slid Muldowney onto the floor of the porch, Angelucci pumped cover fire into the hole.
With a sidearm toss Muldowney lobbed his homemade bomb through the hole, across the porch of 6219, and against the front-porch bunker of the MOVE house. He and Angelucci were barely inside the living room again when the blast came.
The explosion reduced the sun porch of 6219 to kindling and destroyed the thin partition between it and the porch of the MOVE house. Through the debris, one could make out half-exposed heavy structures inside the MOVE porch. They seemed unaffected by the explosives.
The firing stopped briefly after the explosion; then it began again. Connor took Muldowney and Angelucci aside. “Give me another one—a bit heavier.”
Muldowney looked skeptically at Angelucci. Despite Connor’s instructions, Muldowney and Angelucci figured a pound and a quarter of C-4 was enough. When they’d finished with the charge, it was exactly the same as the first—one block of C-4. Again Muldowney held it out to the sergeant. Connor shook his head. “You throw it,” he said.
This time it worked. It worked so well, in fact, that it threw half of the MOVE porch into the middle of the street.
Looking through the hole, Angelucci was shocked. He could see, in what was left of the MOVE porch, something that looked like a log cabin. MOVE had used heavy tree trunks to build a bunker inside the porch. There were ports cut out at the top and bottom, with long, narrow crawl spaces behind them. They were designed so a person could lie protected in the spaces and shoot through the ports.
As Angelucci looked, Freer edged up beside him. “Look,” Angelucci said to him, pointing to the upper crawl space. “Do you see it?” Freer’s eyes peered through the dust and debris, trying to make out details in the darkened space. “What?”
“Do you see something up there?” Angelucci pointed again.
“I can’t tell,” Freer said. “A jacket, maybe.”
Angelucci didn’t think it was a jacket. He was almost certain that he was looking at a body—with its decapitated head resting between the knees.
But even this blast didn’t stop the shooting for long. Apparently the MOVE people had access to the second floor of 6219; the path of the bullets suggested that they were firing into 6217 from the top of the stairs. Other bullets seemed to be coming from the baseboard level, as if MOVE had cut ports between its basement and the first floor of 6219.
Connor radioed Marandola and told him they were stalemated. Marandola, in turn, raised Powell and told him they’d have to proceed without Team B.
In the basement of 6223, Klein set the fuse and took cover on the far side of the tiny cellar. The others had already gone upstairs.
The blast barely penetrated the thick stone foundation. Nearly all of the force was instead blown back into the basement, knocking down the steps. It also dislodged hundreds of cockroaches that had migrated into the joists and woodwork from the MOVE house. They rained down on Klein like a biblical plague and quickly scampered away.
After Klein propped up what was left of the steps and made his way upstairs, the team regrouped. The charge hadn’t gone through. If he put another charge down there, it would blow the joists loose. Powell decided to try the next charge upstairs. He told Mulvihill and D’Ulisse to stay on the first floor.
In the second-floor hallway, at the top of the stairs, Klein placed his second jet-tapper while the others took cover in the front bedroom. When the blast came, it threw him through the bedroom doorway.
Klein slowly got up and dusted himself off. He seemed disoriented. The jet-tapper had once again failed to breach the walls. Though they’d tested them earlier against a cinder block wall, the solid brick walls of the row house had proved to be much stronger. Finally Powell suggested that they simply put another jet-tapper in the crater that the first had created. The second blast, he figured, should breach the wall.
Klein and the others went back to the front bedroom to get the third and final jet-tapper. As Klein bent down to prepare the fuse, the room erupted in gunfire. The firing was coming into the bedroom—through the wall adjoining the MOVE house. The officers dove to the floor as chunks of brick and plaster flew across the room. Klein felt a pain in his knee as if it had exploded; he’d been hit by a bullet or a piece of the wall. A splinter of oak flooring had ripped into his hand. Powell fired a burst toward the wall and the shooting stopped. Instinctively they all crawled toward the closet. It was maybe four feet square. Guns and all, they scrambled in, unable to close the door. Powell had dragged Klein toward the closet, but he couldn’t fit inside. He sat outside, bleeding from his knee and his hand. “I’m going to die,” he said out loud. “I’m going to die before I get my broker’s license.” Klein could still hear blasts of gunfire from the first floor and Powell frantically calling for help on the radio, but suddenly everything seemed hushed. Expectant, almost. Right near his ear he could hear rapid, shallow breathing—his own? No, it was Officer James Laarkamp.
Klein imagined dark eyes peering through a peephole in the common wall. MOVE was waiting for them. The MOVE people would hold their fire, wait for them all to come out of the closet, and then cut them to pieces. Everyone in this closet was a dead man.
And the only thing he could think of was that he’d never get his broker’s license.
On a rooftop diagonally across from the bunkers, two cops lay on their bellies, trapped by an avalanche of gunfire. When the shooting started, they’d tried to evacuate the roof but couldn’t move from behind the low brick parapet in front of them. They’d set off smoke grenades, but it seemed someone had taken a good bead on them, for the bullets still zinged inches above their heads. Finally the firing eased off, and the two escaped down ladders held in position by fire fighters.
In Post 4, on Pine Street behind the bunkers, Sergeant Don Griffiths crouched in a bedroom window and watched bullets rip into the sandbags and splinter the wooden frame. In Post 1 a sharpshooter heard a bullet zip past his shoulder and strike a sandbag. Bullets ricocheted up and down and across Osage Avenue and beyond. One hit a car parked half a block away on Cobbs Creek Parkway.
Officer John LaCon, stationed on the front porch in Post 2, stopped firing for a moment and bent down to examine his rifle. As he did, a bullet passed through the screen door and the space where his head had been only seconds before. It split his riot helmet in two like an oyster, seared across the skin of his neck, and buried itself in the woodwork of the porch behind him.
How much time had they spent trapped in the bedroom? Klein wondered. Maybe minutes; maybe hours.
He studied the bullet holes in the common wall. They were arranged in a circle, slanting away from the center as if someone had stood on the other side and swung a machine gun around in an arc.
What was happening on the other side of that wall? Was anyone there?
Powell spoke. “Laarkamp’s hyperventilating. We’ve got to get him out of here.” Klein looked back over his shoulder and saw that Laarkamp was looking bad. Beneath his gas mask his eyes were glazed and his face was white. His breath came raspy and quick through the mask.
Berghaier spoke up. “I’ll go.” Before anyone could answer, he was taking Laarkamp—who outweighed him by close to a hundred pounds—out of the closet. Laarkamp was too heavy to carry, so Berghaier led him down the steps. His voice muffled by the gas mask, he shouted encouragement: “Keep going! We’ll make it!”
No shots came through the wall as Berghaier disappeared out the doorway. The only sound was that of his combat boots pounding on the hallway floorboards and down the stairs.
Downstairs, Mulvihill and D’Ulisse were crouching behind a radiator. They’d heard the gunfire and the muffled yelling from the upstairs bedroom—and then, seconds later, the living room had been filled with flying bullets, and they had scrambled for cover. As Berghaier came down the stairs, he saw that the wall behind D’Ulisse and Mulvihill had been destroyed by gunfire. He helped Laarkamp down the broken cellar steps and to the back door. Running at a trot, staying close to the houses, they made their way down the alley toward Cobbs Creek Parkway and the waiting ambulance.
Ed Connor stood in the bathroom of 6217, poking a long, slender object through the skylight above. It was a military periscope, and Connor was looking through it to see if there was any way they could mount an assault across the rooftops.
Through the periscope the bunker looked almost close enough to touch. It wasn’t more than twenty feet away, and Connor could clearly see the heavy planking, the foot-square cutouts framed in rough lumber. It was a crude structure, almost juvenile—it looked almost like a tree house built by a bunch of neighborhood kids.
But it was more sophisticated than it looked. Although Connor couldn’t tell from his vantage point, the inside of the front bunker was lined with heavy steel decking stolen from road-repair sites around the city. Years ago people had said that Vince Leaphart could build anything out of a pile of sticks. This was undoubtedly his masterpiece.
Ed Connor shook his head and lowered the periscope. There would be no rooftop assault this day.
After some twenty minutes Powell and the others warily came out of the closet. The shooting had stopped.
His hands still shaking, Klein placed the third jet-tapper on the wall in the hallway. This one finally worked, blowing a rough eighteen-inch hole in the wall.
Mellor brought the pepper fogger over and shoved it into the hole. He pulled the cord, and the small gasoline engine roared to life. Then it quit—damaged, perhaps, in the gun battle or by the explosions.
By now they were simply improvising. They lobbed flash-bangs through the hole—to scare off anyone who might be nearby—followed by half a dozen tear gas grenades. Some of the tear gas went into the MOVE house—police in the posts around the house could see it coming out through the slats that covered the windows—but most of it came back into the hallway and filled the second floor of 6223. Giving up in disgust, Powell and the others went back downstairs.
In the relative safety of the kitchen, Powell and his men listened as the barrage of gunfire outside went on and on. Klein checked his watch and was surprised to find that it was only nine o’clock in the morning. It felt like dinnertime to him. He hadn’t slept a wink in more than twenty-four hours. Since the operation had begun, he’d been gassed, soaked, shot at, rained on by cockroaches, and thrown through the air by the blast of explosives. And still they weren’t close to accomplishing their objective.
Powell radioed Marandola. He could barely hear him over the sound of the gunfire and the chopper that was hovering overhead. “What do we do now?” he yelled into the walkie-talkie.
Marandola radioed back. “Is there any way you can get tear gas into the house?” he asked.
Powell thought it over. He had one idea, he told Marandola. Perhaps they could place a shaped charge low on the living room wall. It would be designed to blow downward at an angle, creating an opening into MOVE’s basement. Then they could toss tear gas grenades through the hole.
Marandola listened. “Wait a minute.” He turned to Captain Kirchner and Commissioner Sambor, just behind him in the living room, and explained Powell’s proposition.
“Ask him if it’s high or low,” Sambor told Marandola.
Marandola relayed the message. “Low,” Powell answered.
Later Sambor would say that he had been asking whether the charge would be a high explosive or a low explosive. Powell would say that he had understood the question to be whether the charge would be placed high on the wall or low on the wall. Sambor told him to go ahead.
Some minutes later three more officers arrived at the back of the house with more explosives. Carefully they picked their way through the rubble of the basement and climbed up to the first floor.
Officer Raymond Graham and Klein built the shaped charge. Using about a third of a pound of C-4, as well as det cord and deta sheet, they created a two-foot-square cardboard-backed charge. For reasons that are not clear, they placed it at about waist level on the wall.
By now Berghaier had returned with a ladder requisitioned from the fire fighters. Team A evacuated down the ladder and through the basement door. Klein set the fuse for five minutes and followed.
Five minutes passed. Second by second they waited—the insertion team in the alley against the back of the house, the brass in Post l. Powell was just starting to wonder if they had another dud when the house shook and an air conditioner flew over his head.
Graham was the first one back in. He took a few steps into the house and stopped. He could see a two-foot hole in the MOVE house. Looking into the shadowy interior, he couldn’t tell whether they’d succeeded in penetrating the basement.
Not that it mattered—the blast had destroyed the interior of 6223. As Klein had feared earlier, this explosion had dislodged the first-floor joists from the foundation. The floor lay in ruins, warped and twisted like a carnival funhouse. “Forget it,” he shouted back to the others. “We can’t go in there. It’s about to collapse.” The group retreated to the alley.
In the back, Powell was now considering one last assault on the house. Team A kicked down the fence to prevent anyone from firing from behind it—an act that would later save Birdie Africa’s life.
With the fence down, the back of the MOVE house was exposed. From here the cops could see the garage door, closed off by cinder blocks, and the small hatch fortified with timbers.
“Here, listen to this.” Powell was standing next to a drainpipe that led into the MOVE garage. Through the pipe he could hear the agitated sound of women’s voices. And of crying children.
The cops looked at one another in disbelief. Despite all the planning, no one had ever told Powell or the others that they’d been unable to pick up the children before the siege had begun. None of them had known that the house that they’d assaulted all morning with guns, tear gas, and explosives had been full of children.
Someone suggested dropping tear gas grenades down the pipe. “Are you crazy?” Powell asked. “You’ll turn that thing into a pipe bomb!”
Just then the radio crackled. “Frank, you guys have to get out of there. Somebody’s trying to point a rifle at you.” Powell looked up and saw a gun barrel sticking out of an upstairs window. Quickly they evacuated down the alley.