The Brooklyn Supreme Court handed down a six-month prison term and a five-year probationary order in connection with the murder of Alysson Pinto-Chaumana on Wednesday, September 18, to 48-year-old Nadeem Anwar of Valley Stream.
Prosecutors said that on August 29, 2019, while the kid and her mother were visiting a friend’s house in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a granite wall consisting of multiple stone pillars and a horizontal stone plate fell on top of the girl. The youngster passed away after sustaining serious brain damage.
According to the investigation, in September 2018, the home’s facade was renovated and a wall was built by City Wide Construction and Renovations, Anwar’s business in Valley Stream.
According to authorities, he had another contractor submit the application for work permits to the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB), even though he possessed a Nassau County contractor license.
Not having a certified engineer or architect examine the wall’s integrity after completion was one of his many infractions of the New York City Building Code.
Upon investigation, a DOB engineer found that none of the pillars had the necessary steel reinforcing bars. There was no engineer-grade glue on the wall, which meant its parts weren’t fastened either.
The wall was found to be extremely unstable and supported mostly by its own weight and gravity, which is a serious breach of various articles of the Building Code, according to Eric Gonzales, the Brooklyn District Attorney.
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According to the engineer, the situation is “imminently perilous to life.”
Anwar and his company were found guilty of criminally negligent murder, submitting a fake instrument for filing, and manipulating business records by a Brooklyn jury on May 14, nearly five years after Alysson’s death.
Gonzales observed that the tragic loss of little Alysson—a product of the defendant’s flagrant disregard for the most fundamental safety regulations outlined in the New York City Building Code—left her mother distraught and bereft of heart.
“The message that will be sent today is that contractors whose careless work puts the public in danger will face severe consequences.”
In 2021, after Alysson’s death and another child’s in the Bronx in the same year, the Department of Buildings started a public awareness campaign on the risks of poorly built stone barriers.
