"It Looks Just Like a War Zone"

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The miscellany of discrepancies, plus the fact that the police consulted no outside experts on crucial questions, was enough to suggest, if nothing else, haphazard decision-making. The issue of the timing was something else again. Law-enforcement specialists elsewhere almost unanimously raised one question: Why did the Philadelphia police move so hurriedly to extreme measures against the cultists? Why not wait, talk and starve them out, which is the standard procedure in such situations?

! Philadelphia authorities say they considered a number of alternative strategies without hitting on a workable one. A crane with a wrecking ball was rejected because there was no way to get the machine in position without putting the operator in the line of fire. The police department's vintage armored personnel carrier was thought to be vulnerable to armor-piercing slugs, which police said were being fired from the house. Delay, Sambor said, would have increased the chance that Move would place explosives in tunnels they claimed to have dug and "blow the block." (This reason looked a bit hollow after the fire, when investigators discovered no tunnels. To explain the absence of heavier weapons in the debris of the Move house, police still theorized that members had been able in some unknown way to move back and forth to other dwellings on Osage.) Finally, police feared that waiting would give Move members a chance to escape in the darkness.

A fuller, unofficial explanation of the haste would certainly give weight to the wish, of Goode and the police, to avoid a repetition of the 1978 confrontation. During that eight-week siege, Move somehow managed to get supplies and in the end had to be forcibly removed. During that operation, a police officer was killed.

Goode was watching the siege on television in his city hall office when the helicopter swooped over the Move house and dropped the explosive satchel. Two floors above Goode, Councilman Lucien Blackwell also saw television footage of the bomb. Recounts Blackwell: "We watched as it dropped. We watched and watched, and the flames were getting larger and larger." Alarmed at seeing no effort to extinguish the fire, Blackwell called the mayor, who told him firemen were being held off out of fear they would be shot at by Move members. Fire Commissioner William Richmond at first accepted responsibility for holding his men off for safety's sake ("They are firemen, not infantrymen"), but Sambor later admitted that they delayed in the hope that the fire would destroy the bunker.

As the inferno gathered intensity, the tragedy took yet one more turn that was to remain wrapped in mystery. Police reported that four people -- two men, a woman and a child -- dashed out from the Move compound. Ramona Africa and the child Birdie were seized, but the two men, who were said to have fired weapons at the police, simply vanished. Police first said they fired back; then they denied it. By week's end authorities had identified two of the bodies recovered from inside the house: Frank James Africa, 26, and Rhoda Harris War Africa, 30, mother of Birdie. The Philadelphia Daily News, citing unnamed police sources, insisted throughout the week that three Move members had been killed outside the house by police gunfire.