Mayor’s Order to Attack MOVE Called Reckless

PHILADELPHIA — Mayor W. Wilson Goode and his top aides showed a “reckless disregard for life and property” when they ordered a bomb dropped on a fortified row house in a confrontation that killed 11 members of the radical MOVE cult and destroyed 61 homes, a special citizens’ commission charged Thursday.

The 10-member panel, hand-picked by Goode, said the deaths of five children in the bloody May 13 clash “appear to be unjustified homicide” and called for a grand jury investigation. However, Commission Chairman William H. Brown III said he believed that police and fire officials, and not the mayor, should be the targets of such a criminal probe.

Though the commission did not call for the resignation or dismissal of any city official, it nevertheless issued a scathing denunciation of the leadership and competence displayed by Goode and his top lieutenants at the time--Managing Director Leo A. Brooks, Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor and Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond. Brooks and Sambor have since resigned.

Plans devised by the four to evict MOVE members from the house they had occupied in a middle-class black neighborhood in West Philadelphia were ridiculed by the panel as “grossly negligent,” “ill-conceived” and “clearly excessive and life-threatening.”

And, even though Goode is black, all but one of the panel members suggested that he and others in his administration would have acted more delicately and with much less force if the standoff had taken place in a white neighborhood.

“The plan to bomb the MOVE house was reckless, ill-conceived and hastily approved,” the panel alleged. “Dropping a bomb on a row house was unconscionable and should have been rejected out of hand by the mayor, the managing director, the police commissioner and the fire commissioner.”

Goode said he would delay a formal response to the allegations until Sunday night. But, appearing on a local television talk show, the mayor vowed, “I will never quit,” and refused to rule out the possibility of running for reelection.

“My concern at this time is running the city,” he said. “ . . . I ran this city since May 13 with all of this going on and I intend to run it for the next 20 months--at least.”

Controversy over the MOVE incident has eroded confidence in Goode’s administration and raised speculation that the political career of one of the leading black politicians in the country might be cut short.

After word of the commission’s findings were leaked to local news media over the weekend, television station WCAU polled 300 city residents and found that 54% agreed with the commission that Goode had acted recklessly. But 49% said they believed that Goode should stay on in office, while 24% said he should resign. Another television poll, by KYW, found that 69% of the 400 adults questioned said he should not quit and 51% thought he should run for reelection.

Evaluation of Findings

Shortly after release of the panel’s report, Dist. Atty. Ronald Castille announced that he was forming a team of assistants to evaluate the findings and determine whether there was sufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing to proceed with a grand jury inquiry.

Another lingering headache for the mayor has been his inability to make good on a pledge to replace all the dwellings destroyed by fire as a result of the clash, which left 250 people homeless. Last May, Goode promised all those burned out that they could move into homes rebuilt at city expense by Christmas. But, so far, only seven of the 61 homes have been completed and the city last week fired the developer overseeing the project for defaulting on the contract.

Despite harsh criticism of the Goode administration, the commission report acknowledged that MOVE--a small, locally based cell of radicals who rejected most accepted standards of sanitation and all went by the surname Africa--had evolved into “an authoritarian, violence-threatening cult” that had terrorized the neighborhood around the home it occupied at 6221 Osage Ave.

But the panel said Goode aggravated the eventual showdown by failing to heed the complaints of area residents about MOVE activities, giving the group time to fortify its house and build a bunker on the rooftop.

Hasty Eviction Plan

When the mayor finally acceded to demands for ouster of the MOVE residents, the eviction plan was hastily and sloppily put together and had little chance of success against a militant group whose residents had vowed to die rather than budge, the commission alleged.

The report said Goode was “grossly negligent” for not calling off the assault when he found out the day before that children were inside the house. And, the panel members said, authorities should have known that with children present the amount of force they employed was “excessive and unreasonable.” During one 90-minute period, 10,000 rounds of ammunition were fired at the dwelling. The MOVE arsenal was later found to include only two pistols, a shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle.

The focus of the criticism, however, revolved around the mayor’s decision to allow the police to drop a bomb from a helicopter on the roof of the house. The explosion ignited gasoline stored on the roof and began a blaze that not only consumed the MOVE house but most of two square blocks of surrounding houses.

Brown, the commission chairman and a prominent local lawyer, said the worst of all the mistakes made during that ill-fated day was the decision by authorities not to fight the fire for at least 40 minutes in the hope that it would force MOVE members to flee. “To allow that fire to burn and to use it as a tactical weapon is absolutely inexcusable,” Brown charged. “I have no doubt in my mind that certainly the lives of those children would have been saved and probably the lives of the adults.”

He said Sambor and Richmond--and not Goode--were responsible for the decision to let the fire burn and therefore were prime targets for the homicide investigation suggested by the panel. But Brown said any grand jury should also look into charges that several officials--possibly including the mayor--lied to the commission during testimony last fall.

Though the panel was unanimous in virtually all of its findings, one member, former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Bruce W. Kauffman, refused to go along with the suggestion that city officials acted callously because the neighborhood was black.

And another panelist, lawyer Charles W. Bowser, issued a separate report even more critical of the actions of city leaders. Bowser, a deputy mayor from 1967 to 1969, hinted strongly that he felt involuntary manslaughter charges should be brought against those responsible for dropping the bomb.

Of the five children who died in the fire, he said: “Their ashes must initiate the legal process to ensure that justice is done.”