"It Looks Just Like a War Zone"

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Given the amount of shooting, it was amazing that nobody was seriously wounded. One bullet hit Sergeant Edward Connors in the back, but he was saved by a flak jacket from anything worse than a bad bruise. By midmorning the guns had fallen all but silent. By early afternoon every plan, gambit and technique tried by the police had failed. They had attempted to bash in the front door. They tried to drill 2-in. holes through the exterior walls in hopes of pumping in tear gas, but were driven away by gunfire from inside the Move house. They tried to break through to the cellar from an adjacent house, but were again turned back by bullets. The fire department had poured tons of water on the roof, demolishing two small bunkers but leaving the main structures intact. Around 2 p.m. Gregore Sambor and other police officials arrived at the fateful idea of attacking from the air.

The decision to bomb the Move house was the most crucial of the confrontation, and for that reason probably spawned more contradictions in subsequent explanations. Sambor told reporters he did not recall who first suggested using explosives to demolish the roof bunker, though he added that Lieut. Powell of the bomb-disposal unit "came up with the recommendation" that they "create" the kind of device that was later dropped by Powell < himself. The Philadelphia Inquirer published an impressively detailed report that for at least 18 months the police had been working up contingency assault plans and studying the Move bunker in photographic blowups. For weeks and possibly months, the paper said, police had been secretly testing various explosives, including Du Pont's Tovex TR-2, which was later used in the attack. While Sambor stuck to his contention that tests showed no reason to suppose Tovex would cause a fire, the Inquirer cited technical lore from Du Pont stating that a detonation would produce heat of from 3,000 degrees to 7,000 degrees F, and quoted Du Pont's insistence that the explosive was intended to be used underground for mining and quarrying, not in the open.

Did the bomb cause the fire? It certainly appeared to on television. Yet Sambor argued otherwise. He blamed the blaze on the presence of other flammable materials that could have caught fire when the bomb detonated. The police commissioner said he believed that Move members might have deliberately spread around combustible fluids like gasoline, and he even said Move members might have intentionally struck the fire that was to kill them. The inescapable peculiarity of Sambor's argument was that it forced him to insist that police, at the time they decided to drop the bomb, had no knowledge that there was any highly flammable material about the house. But it was almost impossible to suppose the police did not know that Move kept gasoline on the roof to run a generator there, and Sambor's own department had earlier said it had information that Move was stashing explosives in the house. Goode, though he tried to side with the Sambor argument, finally admitted that television film made it appear that the fire started with the explosion of the bomb. Had it been made clear to Goode that a Tovex bomb was to be dropped on the roof? Said Goode: "What was said to me was that they were going to use an explosive device to blow the bunker off the roof."