West Philadelphia, May 13, 1985. (Credit: Kevin Tucker for CBS News)
I had a classmate in sixth grade named Frank Schinchirimini who woke up on May 13, 1985 with one purpose - to celebrate his 12th birthday.
He was so looking forward to going to our local grade school - St. Donato's in the Overbrook section of West Philadelphia - to be able to celebrate it with more than 30 of his closest friends.
It was nearing the end of our year, our class was rowdy and uncontrollable. Our teacher, Ms. Eileen Lynch, had no prayer of calming us down - except on class birthdays. There was always a classroom party, and knowing we could have that in the afternoon, we were always on our best behavior in the morning.
But Frank never got to have that party.
No, it wasn't because we forgot, were out of control, and subsequently punished by Miss Lynch. No, quite the contrary. Miss Lynch didn't have to discipline us at all.
That's because we got the surprise when we woke up that school was closed for the day.
See, there was an emergency in the neighborhood. There was a standoff between police and a group of people who had barricaded themselves inside their home.
Oh, and there were gunshots. Lots of them. More than 10,000 to be exact.
"I woke up and was getting ready to go to school and all we heard were what sounded like firecrackers going off and lots of sirens going down 63rd Street," Schinchirimini, who now lives in Exton, said. "We started watching the news and when we realized what was happening, everyone started freaking out. It was a weird day."
Jason Kovach, who lived across the street from Schinchirimini at the time, but now lives with his family in Ridley, remembered the same sounds right after his mom woke him up that morning.
When school was cancelled, he was elated - as we all were. But, 1985, being a different time than today, didn't result in as much concern for safety.
"Gunshots in the neighborhood? No problem, go walk the streets and hang out with your friends," Kovach said was what parents were like that day. "Imagine that being the case today? We'd have our kids on lock down."
And he's not wrong, because you know where Kovach was for most of the day? My house.
That's right. With an unexpected off day, we decided to sit in my living room and play games. We were mostly oblivious to what was happening that day, although my dad, who road the El to work in the morning, boarding at 63rd Street, called home from his office and told my mother not to let me outside because he saw someone with a rifle walking openly on the street near the El stop.
But that was the extent of the concern. Not, "Hey, get in the car and get out of the neighborhood." Chilling out at home with a friend was just fine.
Of course, we had no idea what was yet to come.
I'm 51 years old now, but I remember May 13, 1985 as if I were still that 11-year-old boy living in West Philadelphia. I lived just nine blocks from Osage Avenue, where the MOVE house stood, and the events of that whirlwind day are etched into my memory. I recall the confusion, fear, and disbelief that swept through our neighborhood as we realized something unimaginable was happening so close to home.
That morning nearly 500 police officers had gathered before dawn to serve arrest warrants on members of a group called MOVE, who lived at 6221 Osage.
I didn’t fully understand, but I knew MOVE was a controversial group – they were our neighbors in a way, just a few blocks over. The city had apparently cut off water and electricity to the MOVE house early in the morning, trying to force the people out.
As a kid, I had only a vague sense of who MOVE was; I’d heard grown-ups complain about them before. They were often in conflict with the police, and neighbors talked about their loudspeaker and the barricades around their house.
Still, it was strange to imagine hundreds of police on a small street in our neighborhood before the sun was even up.
By lunchtime, Kovach was at my house telling me about the firecracker sounds he had heard that morning. In reality, a firefight had erupted between MOVE and the police earlier that day: we later learned the standoff involved tear gas and over 10,000 rounds of ammo fired in ninety minutes.
The 1985 MOVE bombing, locally known by its date, May 13, 1985, was the destruction of residential homes in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by the Philadelphia Police Dept during a standoff with MOVE, a black liberation organization. pic.twitter.com/yTMiMCrCqi
That afternoon was strange.
We left the front door open, as my mom often did in the spring to let the outside air into the house. I lived on a street that was usually a little busier. Cars would travel up and down all day. There was a convenience store and a sandwich shop across the street that were constant flow of foot traffic. The corner of my block was a hangout for guys in their early 20s, always out there smoking cigarettes, or listening to rock music on their little transistor radios while playing street games like halfball, or wire ball.
But on this day, it was eerily quiet. Kovach and I would look outside and see very few people.
There were more sirens than usual in the distance, but other than that - silence.
Even Frank the huckster, the old Italian guy who used to slowly drive up and down streets with his open-ended box truck calling out through a speaker mounted on it that he was there with fresh fruits and vegetables for residents to come out and buy from him for a few bucks, wasn't there.
Inside our house, the T.V. was on. We were an Action News family and always watched Channel 6.
Kovach and I weren't completely invested at first, but as things became more and more heightened on Osage Ave. throughout the day, we stopped playing our little games and started paying closer attention.
We could hear reporters frantically updating the situation. MOVE was a word on everyone’s lips.
It was a little after 5 P.M. when Kovach was getting ready to walk home to get ready for baseball practice we had that night. We were just saying we'd see each other again in about a half hour, when a sound we had never heard before interrupted our conversation.
"Ii was like, 'What the hell was that.' It shook your entire house," Kovach said. "We felt the whole thing."
My mom came running in from the kitchen with my aunt, who had stopped by with my two baby cousins a little earlier.
My grandfather, who lived next door, ran over to see if we were O.K.
"It was a mini-explosion, and it sounded like it was coming through the walls," Schinchirimini said. He was down the street, about a half block closer to Osage Ave. than Jason and I.
May 13, 1985, a bomb was dropped on the MOVE row home in Philadelphia by a police helicopter on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue ... destroying 65 rowhouses, killed 11 people (5 children).
40 years ago. pic.twitter.com/TYLdDPkFSj
We didn’t know it at the time, but that thunderous noise was a bomb exploding. In a move that still defies belief, the police had dropped a satchel bomb from a helicopter onto the MOVE house. They intended to destroy a reinforced bunker on the roof, but the plan proved disastrous – the rooftop, laden with tar and gasoline, erupted into an inferno.
For a few moments after the explosion, we were all in shock, processing that massive tremor and the faint rumble that followed.
We all rushed out on to the porch and could now see a thick column of black smoke curling upward against the sky. It grew darker and broader by the minute.
Worried that his mother probably wanted him home, my grandfather watched Kovach cross the street and run toward his house. Suddenly, the activity that was missing all day, was bustling on our street.
The neighbors’ seemed confused. Some ran to their cars, perhaps to drive closer or to find family members. Others just stood in the street, hands on their heads. I heard one frantic voice: “They dropped a bomb on them!” The words sounded unreal, like something from a foreign war. Our city’s police had bombed a house in our neighborhood, and none of us knew what would happen next.
One would think that all activities in the neighborhood would be canceled that night, right? Or - at the very least - parents wouldn't let their kids out of the house until the dust settled.
Not our parents. Not our neighborhood. Baseball practice went on as planned.
I went up to Granahan Field, on the corner of Callowhill and Daggett Streets. The field is weirdly constructed as it is elevated above a section of the neighborhood.
From the one corner of the field, there was a clear vision of the neighborhood above the tree line.
And although we were technically practicing, none of us were interested in baseball. We kept hovering at the same spot in left field where we could see giant flames above the trees.
Those flames grew as they consumed the rowhomes on Osage Avenue and Pine Street as smoke billowed even higher.
Down closer to the action, neighbors gathered behind police barricades, watching in horror as the fire spread house to house.
As dusk fell, the situation only worsened. What started as one burning house spread to the adjacent homes with frightening speed.
"I can't believe it's been 40 years, but I will never forget the sight of the orange glow against the skyline and plumes of smoke rising" like a thundercloud, Kovach said.
It looked like the whole world beyond Market Street was on fire.
When we got back home, the T.V. coverage was all anyone cared about. We were watching on live television people shouting, “Why aren’t they putting it out?”
It was true – perplexingly, firefighters were not dousing the flames at first. Later we learned that officials had ordered them to stand down initially, letting the blaze burn to flush out MOVE members.
For over an hour, no water was poured on the burning homes.
By the time hoses were aimed at the flames, it was far too late. In the crowd, frustration and horror grew as house after house caught fire. I remember the flicker of red lights and the silhouette of rowhomes. One by one, houses were swallowed up by the flames.
The fire leapt down the block ferociously; it didn’t care where MOVE’s house ended and other families’ homes began. Residents watched in stunned disbelief as our city essentially burned its own neighborhood.
Ash and soot started raining down on the neighborhood, carried by the wind. I remember the smell even at our distance.
It smelled of burning wood, tar, and something chemical.
The sky turned an apocalyptic orange-gray, and hot cinders drifted like dark snowflakes.
Despite the chaos, I felt a child’s curiosity amid fear – I had never seen so many fire engines and police vehicles in one place, lights flashing in the darkening night.
Through the commotion, word started to spread that some people had escaped the burning MOVE house. One was a child, not much older than me. I later learned it was 13-year-old Birdie Africa (his given name was Michael) – he was the only child who got out alive, as five others died in the bombing.
Another survivor, a woman named Ramona Africa, also managed to flee with him, and she was immediately taken into police custody.
When we saw her on the news, my Mom realized she had gone to school with her at West Catholic High School. Her given name was Ramona Johnson, but she had changed it to Ramona Africa after she joined MOVE a few years earlier, upon graduating from Temple University.
Finally, the firefighters started directing powerful streams of water onto the blaze, but as I said earlier, it was too late. Neighbors still prayed that more people might have made it out. We watched desperately, but no one else emerged from the embers.
It was late at night when my parents and I finally turned off the T.V. The fire raged for hours, but by around midnight the flames had largely been beaten down.
In those hours, 61 homes were incinerated – nearly two city blocks of our neighborhood turned to charred ruins.
Hundreds of our neighbors were left homeless that night. The glow in the sky was fading, but a huge column of smoke continued to drift upward, illuminated by floodlights.
Our neighborhood that had been filled with rowhouse chatter and children playing just the day before was now filled with smoke, shock, and sorrow.
The reality set in. My mom hugged me tightly and wouldn’t let go for a long time. Before turning off the news news, we learned the horrific truth: 11 people were presumed to have died in that bombing and fire, including the five children.
I was only a kid, so the next day at school, it was all we talked about and everyone had some off-color jokes about what happened.
"We told them for weeks," Kovach said. "Looking back, we didn't know any better. And it was so wrong, but that's who we were at the time. But it didn't take long for me to learn how wrong it was.
"My dad did work down there and he told me how nice a street it was and that everyone there took care of their homes and were really great people. The city really screwed them over. Not only did they drop a bomb and make 250 people homeless to try and evict one house, which was insane, but after they rebuilt the homes, they had to condemn them because they were not up to code and falling apart. It's a real embarrassment."
I never told anyone, but for weeks, in the darkness of my bedroom, every time I closed my eyes I saw flames.
Even now, decades later, the MOVE bombing remains one of the defining memories of my childhood. I can still picture the rowhouses engulfed in flames and taste the grit of ash in the air.
The fact that the details of such a random, spring day from 40 years ago are so vividly fresh explains the impact that the day had on people like me, and Kovach and Schinchirimini - and we didn't even live on Osage Ave. or Pine St. Imagine what it was like for those people and their families.
I didn’t fully grasp the politics or the blame back then – I was just a kid watching my neighborhood burn.
What stays with me most is the sense of loss: loss of life, of homes, of normalcy.
May 13, 1985 started as an ordinary day and ended with a tragedy that changed our community forever.
And though I was nine blocks away, it felt like the heart of that fire was right on my doorstep, a sight and feeling I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
