NEW YORK (1010 WNIS) — A construction company based in Nassau County and its owner were indicted on multiple charges including manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after a “dangerously flawed” stone fence collapsed on a 5-year-old Brooklyn girl, killing her in front of her mother, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The girl, Alysson Pinto-Chaumana, was with her mom and a few friends visiting another friend on August 29, 2019 around 8:30 p.m. at a three-story building in Bushwick when the accident occurred.
Pinto-Chaumana was outside with the group in a patio enclosed by a 68-inch-high wall. The group was by the decorative wall when the pillars and horizontal plate fell onto the young victim, fatally crushing her skull as her mother watched.
"I saw it all come down, crushing her head", the mother Maria Lorena Chauman recounted in Spanish to NBC 4. "I desperately picked her up -- I picked up my daughter, crying out to her."
An investigation revealed 46-year-old Nadeem Anwar, the licensed contractor who built the fence, violated multiple city building code rules when he was hired in September 2018 to renovate the property facade and build the wall.
Anwar was licensed as a contractor in Nassau County so he allegedly had another contractor file for work permits with the NYC Department of Buildings for the facade work. The wall went beyond the scope of the application and Anwar allegedly never got the required application for it.
Along with improper permissions, Anwar failed to have a licensed engineer or architect conduct a post-construction analysis of the wall's stability which is a city ordinance requirement.
According to the indictment, there were no steel reinforcing bars in any of the pillars, a NYC buildings engineer who responded to the collapse site observed. The engineer also said the wall was held together mainly by its own weight and gravity making it “highly unstable.”
Anwar, along with his company City Wide Construction and Renovations, Inc., both based in Valley Stream, are charged with reckless endangerment, offering a false instrument for filing and falsifying business records in addition to the death-related counts. Anwar is due back in court in May and was released on bail.
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