Philadelphia police drop a bomb on a row house; fire spreads for hours, killing 11
On the afternoon of May 13, 1985, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor ordered a bomb dropped on a row house at 6221 Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia. Lt. Frank Powell, flying in a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, released two explosive devices onto the occupied building. The fire that followed burned for hours while officials allowed it to spread — destroying 61 homes across two city blocks, leaving 250 people homeless, and killing 11 people inside the house, five of them children.
The MOVE bombing stands as one of the only documented instances of an American city deliberately dropping an explosive device on its own civilian neighborhood. A federal jury later found the city liable for excessive force and Fourth Amendment violations. The case remains a reference point in American debates over police power, municipal accountability, and the limits of state authority against its own residents — and Philadelphia is still litigating its obligations to the block forty years later.
QWhat happened to the bones of two children killed in the bombing — decades after the fire?
The remains of Tree Africa (Katricia Dotson, 14) and Delisha Orr Africa (12) were kept for decades at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2021, the journalist outlet Billy Penn reported that the bones had been used by anthropologist Janet Monge as case studies in an online forensics course called 'Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.' The same year, Philadelphia's Health Commissioner Thomas Farley resigned after it emerged that in 2017 he had ordered the cremation and disposal of victims' remains without identifying them or contacting their families. A day after his resignation, staff at the Medical Examiner's Office found a box labeled 'MOVE' in a refrigerated area of their office — the remains had never been destroyed. In November 2024, further remains believed to belong to Delisha Africa were found at Penn.
QHow did the city's promise to rebuild the destroyed block turn into a second scandal twenty years later?
By late 1985, the city had contracted with a private developer to rebuild the 61 destroyed homes on Osage Avenue. Displaced residents moved back in — and quickly found the construction defective. In 1995, the Ed Rendell administration brought in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which confirmed the rebuilt houses were not up to code. The city spent another decade trying to remedy the defects without success. By 2005, Philadelphia simply gave up and offered $150,000 to any resident willing to leave. More than two-thirds accepted and abandoned their homes. The block that police had destroyed in 1985 was emptied again, this time by the city's own buyout, twenty years later.
QWhat was the sole criminal conviction to come out of the bombing — and who served time?
Not a single city official or police officer was criminally charged for the bombing, the deaths, or the destruction of 61 homes. The only person convicted in connection with the events of May 13 was Ramona Africa, the sole surviving adult MOVE member. She refused to testify in court and was charged and convicted on counts of riot and conspiracy. She served seven years in prison. In 1996, a federal jury awarded her $500,000 in a civil suit for the pain, suffering, and physical harm she endured in the fire — part of a $1.5 million judgment against the city that also covered relatives of two people killed in the bombing.
