A construction company in Nassau County and its owner have been charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and other charges in connection with the death of a 5-year-old Brooklyn girl in 2019, who was killed when a “dangerously defective” stone fence collapsed over her, he said. prosecutors. Tuesday. It happened in front of her mother.
The child, Alysson Pinto-Chaumana, and her mother, along with a couple of friends, visited another friend on Harman Street, a three-story building in Bushwick, around 8:30 p.m. on August 29, 2019, when the accident happened. .
The group stood outside waiting near the front door for an enclosed patio next to a 68-inch-high wall that fenced off the patio. The decorative wall had a base of heavy stone columns topped with horizontal stone slabs. Without warning, the pillars and the horizontal plate, according to the indictment, fell inward on Pinto-Chaumana, shattering her skull and causing her death – right in front of her mother.
“I saw it all fall down and crush her head,” the despairing mother, Maria Lorena Chaumana, told in Spanish at the time she was holding a picture of her little girl. “I desperately picked her up – I picked up my daughter and cried for her.”
“Why did you have to leave me?” Chaumana cried, adding that she was a single mother living solely for her daughter, who was to start kindergarten in the coming days. “My life. My love. She was so clever.”
The horrific event will remain engraved in Chauman’s memory, she said.
“I saw it all with my own eyes and I will never forget. I can not forget,” she said.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the licensed contractor who built the fence, 46-year-old Nadeem Anwar, was hired to renovate the property’s facade and build the wall in September 2018, allegedly violating several city building regulations.
He was licensed as a contractor in Nassau County, but not authorized to apply for work permits to the NYC Department of Buildings, so he allegedly got another contractor to submit the application for the facade work. However, that application did not reach the wall and Anwar reportedly never got one, which was required.
The contractor has allegedly also neglected to get a licensed engineer or architect to perform a post-construction analysis of the stability of the wall as required by the city ordinance. A NYC civil engineer who responded to the crash site saw no steel reinforcement bars in any of the columns as required, according to the indictment, and also determined that it was held together mainly by its own weight and gravity.
It made it “very unstable” and marked a “gross violation of several provisions of the Building Code,” according to prosecutors. The engineer described the conditions as “imminently dangerous” for the little girl’s life, they said.
Anwar and his firm, City Wide Construction and Renovations, Inc., both of Valley Stream, are accused of reckless endangerment, offering a false instrument for filing and falsifying business records in addition to the death-related counts. Anwar was released without bail and is due back in court in May.
Lawyer information was not immediately clear to him or his firm. A man who picked up the phone at City Wide Construction on Tuesday afternoon said he was not aware of the case.