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Man Suffers Fractured Skull After Brooklyn Building Facade Falls On Him
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jul 23, 2020
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Jul 23, 2020
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A man sustained serious injuries, including a fractured skull, after a Brooklyn building facade collapsed and fell onto him yesterday.
A police spokesperson said the incident happened around 3 p.m. on Wednesday at 1412 St. John’s Place near Utica Avenue in Crown Heights. The victim, who has been identified as 39-year-old Oumar Ba, was walking down the street around 3:15 p.m. when the second floor facade began to collapse, and debris and bricks rained onto him.
Ba was taken to Kings County Hospital, where he is in serious but stable condition. His wife told NBC he has a fractured skull and injuries to his ribs and shoulder.
You can see a snippet of a security camera clip of the incident here.
"He wasn't talking, not talking at all," Abdouramane Thiam, a friend of Ba's who he was visiting at the time, told NBC. "For me, I thought it was over for him. I was praying to God. Even when I called 911, I could not even talk to them. I just was praying."
The Department of Buildings (DOB) has ordered the building to be fully vacated and is conducting an investigation into the collapse. A spokesperson told Gothamist that "a 6 foot ornamental stone fell off the parapet wall at the front of the building, which is currently occupied by an Ideal Food Basket grocery store." They have determined that repair work on the parapet walls of the building was being conducted illegally without the necessary DOB permits.
The DOB has issued violations for failure to maintain the building, and for illegal work performed without a permit. The city has also issued a Stop Work Order for the illegal work, and a Partial Vacate Order for the grocery store’s loading dock. The building owner has also been ordered to erect a sidewalk shed across the front of the property immediately.
The DOB issued a warning on Tuesday to property owners, contractors and crane operators to take precautions and secure their construction sites, buildings, and equipment because of high winds and severe weather that hit NYC this week.
This is the latest partial or full building collapse to happen in recent weeks: at the start of the month, a three-story building housing Body Elite Gym collapsed in Carroll Gardens, and it later emerged that the DOB had issued multiple violations and fines against the property owner in recent years for cracks and bulges throughout the property. On July 8th, a person was injured when a five-story building partially collapsed in Murray Hill.
And last week, a man working on a different Murray Hill building’s scaffolding died and three others were injured when the scaffolding collapsed. Also last week, a vacant building partially collapsed in a construction site in the same neighborhood.
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Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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