Brooklyn

Indictments Issued in NYC Stone Wall Collapse That Killed 5-Year-Old in Front of Her Mom

Alysson Pinto-Chaumana was just 5 years old when a stone wall collapsed on her in Brooklyn in 2019, killing her right in front of her mother

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A Nassau County construction company and its owner have been indicted on manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and other charges in the 2019 death of a 5-year-old Brooklyn girl who was killed when a "dangerously flawed" stone fence collapsed on her, prosecutors said Tuesday. It happened in front of her mother.

The child, Alysson Pinto-Chaumana, and her mom, along with a few friends, were visiting another friend on Harman Street, a three-story building in Bushwick, around 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 29, 2019, when the accident happened.

The group was outside waiting near the front door on an enclosed patio next to a 68-inch-high wall that fenced in the patio. The decorative wall had a base of heavy stone pillars topped with stone horizontal plates. Without warning, according to the indictment, the pillars and horizontal plate fell inward onto Pinto-Chaumana, crushing her skull and causing her death -- right in front of her mother.

"I saw it all come down, crushing her head," the distraught mother, Maria Lorena Chaumana, recounted in Spanish at the time as she held a photo of her little girl. "I desperately picked her up -- I picked up my daughter, crying out to her."

"Why did you have to leave me?" Chaumana cried, adding that she was a single mother who solely lived for her daughter who was set to start kindergarten in the upcoming days. "My life. My love. She was so smart."

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't forget," she said.

An ensuing investigation revealed the licensed contractor who built the fence, 46-year-old Nadeem Anwar, was hired to renovate the property facade and build the wall in September 2018 and allegedly violated multiple city building code rules.

He was licensed as a contractor in Nassau County but not authorized to file for work permits with the NYC Department of Buildings, so he allegedly had another contractor file the application for the facade work. That application did not extend to the wall, however, and Anwar allegedly never got one, which was required.

The contractor also allegedly neglected to have a licensed engineer or architect conduct a post-construction analysis of the wall's stability as required by city ordinance. An NYC buildings engineer who responded to the collapse site saw no steel reinforcing bars in any of the pillars as required, according to the indictment, and also determined it was held together mainly by its own weight and gravity.

That made it "highly unstable" and marked an "egregious violation of multiple provisions of building code," according to prosecutors. The engineer described the conditions as "imminently perilous" to the little girl's life, they said.

Anwar and his company, 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.

Attorney information wasn't immediately clear for him or his company. A man who answered the phone at City Wide Construction Tuesday afternoon said he wasn't aware of the case.

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