Crushed On Market Street

This is the site of the Salvation Army thrift shop in Downtown Philadelphia. This past Wednesday, a 4-story building next to it (going away from my camera) was in the middle of being torn down when its wall fell the wrong way, destroying the thrift shop, killing six people, and injuring thirteen.

The shop was more crowded than usual because there was a store-wide discount on Wednesdays. I have shopped there, though not in recent years. It could have been me who was killed, or Ceridwen and I, or any of hundreds of people I know.

Demolition crews in the private sector are hardly regulated at all here. The wall was making passers-by nervous for days before the disaster. The man operating the excavator machine was supposedly high on marijuana and has a criminal record. He's looking at a long jail sentence. Sean Benschop has been charged on "six counts of involuntary manslaughter, 13 counts of recklessly endangering another person and one count of risking a catastrophe." He is 47 years old.

If the building was owned by the city or the state, Sean Benschop would not have been operating anything more dangerous than a wheel barrow. The pay rate would have been around five times as high, the safety and planning of the work would have been very thorough, as is to be expected in the heart of a large American city. The guy bringing down a hundred tons of loose bricks like a hailstorm would make no mistakes, he would not be stoned on the job, and he'd have a union contract. Nobody would be telling him to hurry up.

From the AP news wire: "Lawyers for the two survivors who have sued accuse demolition contractor Griffin Campbell - who has a criminal background and has filed for bankruptcy twice - of violating federal safety regulations. They say building owner Richard Basciano should have picked a more qualified and competent contractor to do the work."

Do you get it? The poor slob at the bottom of the food chain pays with his freedom and will probably die in prison. The contractor and the building owner are being sued, not charged as criminals --they'll just pay out money for the six dead bodies.

This pisses me off!

It reminds me of Philadelphia's 1882 body-snatching scandal. The grave robbers went to jail, but the anatomy professor at Jefferson Hospital, who bought bodies from them, wound up as a hero of Medicine.

It reminds me of the tragedy at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. All the people, who organized and caused the deaths of over 900 people, also died on that November evening in the jungle. One man, Larry Layton, spent around 20 years in a US prison, though he killed no one. It's an extremely complex tale, but only Larry paid for the crimes of Jim Jones.

I have been waiting for a new camera to arrive since my old one crapped out. My phone's camera has such limited talents that it frustrates me badly when looking for a blip. I may do a few back-blips with blurry shots later on, but this is why I've been skipping blips.