A building under construction at 94 E. 208th St. near Steuben Avenue collapsed, leaving one worker dead and two injured. Police and fire crews flocked to the scene within minutes. 

The incident took place just before noon on Aug. 27. Multiple eyewitnesses recalled hearing a loud noise, but assumed it was a normal construction protocol. However, cries for help from the workers confirmed otherwise. 

“Three of them [workers] ran out. The initial person who told us to call 911, he had lacerations to the head, a lot of blood leaking down on his face. I think he was trying to assist whoever was trapped inside, to help him get out,” said Anika James, an employee at Montefiore Hospital located several blocks up from the scene. 

Two workers suffered minor injuries, while two were taken away with serious injuries.

It took FDNY firefighters about an hour to dig and find the body of the trapped worker, who was found dead under the rubble from severe injuries. Prior to it collapsing, neighbors could overhear workers complaining about the durability of the scaffold. 

“It’s not safe, it’s really not safe. It’s too small of a space to try to cram everything. When walking past, you could hear them this morning, they were struggling to keep things in control. I think they couldn’t,” said Dr. Violet Wallace, director of a nearby church. 

“We were kind of scared because we saw the bricks, they were crashing down,” added Wallace who was walking past the building with two co-workers as it collapsed. 

The workers had been about three to four months in on the project, as permits for the property from were issued in May by the city’s Department of Buildings (DOB). Building permits show that workers were building a new four-story residential building with eight units.

A preliminary investigation by the DOB determined that the third floor of the building was overloaded with concrete masonry blocks, causing it to collapse onto the second floor below, ultimately trapping the worker who died. They also revealed that prior to today, no violations were reported to this construction site. 

“This was a preventable tragedy and our hearts go out to the family of the worker who died. No building is ever worth a person’s life. We will continue to investigate this incident aggressively and bring all appropriate enforcement actions against those responsible,” DOB said in a statement released to Norwood News. 

The DOB has issued a full stop-work order for the project and ordered the building owner to secure the site overnight. Pioneer General Construction group is listed as the current general contractor for the property. Residents were left wondering whether the site was safe enough for workers, given what they saw and the speed at which the building had gone up.

“I call it negligence, they didn’t have the required equipment for the job, you could see the metal was bent,” said Elisa Luna, a Norwood resident familiar with construction site, often visiting her mom who lives in a building directly across the street. “It’s hurtful, somebody is dead because you couldn’t get the proper tools, because you couldn’t create a safer environment for these people to work in,” said Luna. 

Additional reporting by Sha-Nia Alston and David Cruz 

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.