Time Passes, but Few Can Forget Philadelphia Siege : Police raid: Before the flames were out, 11 people were dead in the MOVE row house. Sixty-two homes were destroyed.

By TED DUNCOMBE

June 4, 1995 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHILADELPHIA — The voice crackled with profanities through a loudspeaker outside the row house at 6221 Osage Ave. “All you ---- cops--you ought to come down and get this started,” it taunted in the pre-dawn darkness of May 13, 1985.

Morning broke with Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor announcing arrest warrants for four people inside. “Attention, MOVE! This is America! You have to abide by the laws of the United States!”

“Come and get us,” the voice replied.

In response, police fired thousands of rounds of ammunition into the house, and firefighters pounded it with water cannons. Finally, a state police helicopter swooped twice over the rooftops and returned to hover. At 5:27 p.m., Philadelphia Police Lt. Frank Powell leaned out and dropped a canvas satchel containing a powerful explosive.

The resulting fire was allowed to burn. Before the flames were out, 11 people in the MOVE house were dead, five of them children. Sixty-two homes were destroyed, and a gaping hole was left in a densely populated, predominantly black, middle-class neighborhood.

Ten years later, the homes are rebuilt, surviving MOVE members live quietly in another part of the city, and a new crew runs City Hall.

Over time, MOVE’s deliberate provocations, their neighbors’ complaints about the stench and their loud profanities and, most of all, the bomb have proven to be a modern parable of dissent and intolerance, racial antagonisms, bureaucratic blunders and legal complexity.

Taxpayers have paid more than $30 million for the rebuilding, the lost lives, one of the investigations and consultants. The total doesn’t include the costs of two grand jury probes, pending legal claims, or a round-the-clock police presence on the block where the battle occurred, necessitated by a legal tussle over the ownership of the rebuilt MOVE house.

“There hasn’t been any closure,” said Gerald W. Renfrow, block captain for the Osage-Pine Neighborhood Assn. “The last 10 years, it’s like having an open wound, because it hasn’t healed for us.”

Consuewella Africa, the daughter of a former Philadelphia police officer, lost two children in the fire, as well as her MOVE comrades.

“Not one person was charged with the murder of my brothers and sisters and my two daughters,” she said.

And former Mayor W. Wilson Goode, the city’s first black mayor and a rising star in the national Democratic Party before that day, now apologizes for his role and tries to turn questions about MOVE to other aspects of his eight-year mayoralty.

“For me, someone who has respected life so much for so long, to be the mayor of a city where there is a loss of life through actions of the government itself, it’s very difficult for me on a personal level to deal with,” he said.

The emergence of MOVE, which was founded in the early 1970s, coincided with the era of Frank Rizzo, whose hard-nosed rule as both police commissioner and mayor gave Philadelphia a reputation for police brutality and surveillance of suspected subversives.

MOVE members espoused nonviolence and opposition to technology. They kept their children out of school, ate raw, unprocessed food and sought equal treatment for animals and humans. They all adopted the surname Africa in honor of their leader, the self-named John Africa, and raised money by washing cars.

Wearing their hair in dreadlocks, MOVE members began to make their presence known citywide at televised school board meetings, where they challenged “the system,” a catch-all term for anything they considered unnatural.

Neighbors’ complaints about MOVE’s house in West Philadelphia and the group’s refusal to let the city inspect it led to a confrontation Aug. 8, 1978, when Rizzo ordered police to arrest 21 members.

The ensuing battle ended with one officer dead and seven other police officers and firefighters wounded. Police were videotaped dragging a MOVE member by the hair, and hitting and kicking him. That house was bulldozed that day.

Nine MOVE members were convicted of murdering Officer James J. Ramp, but a judge ordered the acquittal of the policemen charged with roughing up the MOVE member, which merely hardened the group’s views against city officials and led to the terrorist tirades that helped spark the cataclysmic bombing.

Police said the bomb was designed to destroy only a rooftop bunker and punch a hole in the roof as a conduit for tear gas--but they erred in mixing explosives.

The warrants they were trying to serve were for offenses ranging from disorderly conduct to possession of explosives; still debated to this day is whether the heavily armed MOVE members continued to fire back after the morning passed.

The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, better known as the MOVE Commission, concluded in 1986 that Goode, Sambor, Managing Director Leo A. Brooks and Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond had been “grossly negligent” in handling the crisis.

“Dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable and should have been rejected out of hand,” the commission said. The deaths of the five children “appear to be unjustified homicides” and should be investigated by a grand jury, the commission added.

No criminal charges ever were filed against a public official or police officer in the 1985 assault, however. The only people convicted of crimes were Ramona Africa, the lone adult to emerge alive from the MOVE house, who served a seven-year sentence for riot and conspiracy convictions, and a contractor convicted of stealing $137,000 intended for rebuilding the homes.

“Many people who don’t agree with what MOVE stands for do feel that they have been wronged,” said William H. Brown III, a lawyer who was MOVE Commission chairman.

This city of more than 40% minorities was left to ponder another troubling question: Did the race of the neighborhood play any role?

“A lot of blacks have the notion that this wouldn’t have happened in a white neighborhood, and they may well be right,” said Elijah Anderson, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Such bitter sentiments are among the hardest to erase, said Justin Schulz, a psychologist who has worked with other communities facing disasters.

“Some things like this really only lose their intensity as the generation that experienced it dies and it no longer has the same emotional weight for following generations,” he said.

The lingering legal fights serve to remind residents of the tragedy.

Just this year, a U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that Goode and his top aides were immune from federal claims but that the city could be sued by Ramona Africa. MOVE, not city officials and police, “put the forces in motion which created the tragedy,” the majority ruled.

In a dissent that symbolizes the city’s ambivalence, Judge Timothy K. Lewis argued that the bomb and fire were an unlawful use of excessive force.

“The police simply were not facing a ‘shoot or be shot’ (or a ‘drop bomb or be shot’) situation at the moment the bomb was dropped,” he wrote. “The suspects were not even fleeing.”

At the Police Department, the loss of life, the stress and the inevitability of confronting their own mortality led to severe problems for several officers who are no longer on the force.

“They tried to deal with the whole situation in the way they could best deal with it,” said Sgt. Frank Clark, commanding officer of the police employees assistance program. “A lot of them were self-medicating with alcohol.”

Former Officer James Berghaier, who rescued 13-year-old Birdie Africa from the flames, ended up on disability with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“This whole thing was hard on a lot of cops,” he said. “The six guys I worked with, five got divorced over this and one committed suicide.”

Clark believes police on the force today generally have put MOVE behind them. Officers today, he said, seem to believe “what has happened did happen, hopefully steps were taken to make sure that nothing like this happens again, but we have to move on.”