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Punishment
for ‘Cavalier’ Act: Prison Time in Scaffold Deaths
By Karen Freifeld
Newsday
January 15, 2004
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/manhattan/nyc-
nysent153627070jan15,0,3773583.story?coll=nyc-topheadlines-left
Calling the collapse of an illegally constructed scaffold
that killed five immigrant workers a "tragic certainty"
rather than an accident, a Manhattan judge yesterday sentenced
the man responsible for the deaths to at least 3 1/2 years
in prison.
State Supreme Court Justice Rena Uviller said she imposed
the 3 1/2- to 10 1/2-year sentence on Philip Minucci, 32,
of Commack, to reflect "the magnitude of the tragedy"
and as a deterrent.
"This sentence will, I trust, serve as a warning to others
who, in pursuit of their own economic interests, care to be
cavalier about the lives of others," the judge said.
The five laborers killed were among 20 masonry workers on
a job in Manhattan Oct. 24, 2001. The majority of workers
were illegal immigrants paid $7 an hour in cash.
Four of the workers were asphyxiated and the fifth was crushed
to death when the scaffold they were standing on collapsed.
Four other workers were seriously injured.
Patricia Sanchez, 28, the widow of laborer Ivan Pillacella,
30, of Ecuador, told the judge through an interpreter yesterday
that her husband had come to New York to improve the family's
life and worked on the scaffold despite his fear of it.
"He used to tell me in the afternoons when he arrived
that he was afraid of going up there," said Sanchez,
the mother of his two children. "But he had to do it
in order to support the children ... and pay the rent."
Minucci, owner of Tri-State Scaffolding & Equipment Supplies,
of Deer Park, designed and built the 130-foot scaffold at
215 Park Ave. S., despite not being a licensed architect or
engineer, as the city's building code requires for any scaffold
over 75 feet high. Minucci never determined how much weight
the scaffold could bear and erected it on three slender beams
so that it exceeded the weight it could carry by more than
200 percent, according to the judge.
"The collapse of this scaffold, designed and built by
Mr. Minucci, was not a tragic accident," Uviller said.
"Rather, it was a tragic certainty."
Minucci, who pleaded guilty in October to second-degree manslaughter,
faced 5 to 15 years in prison if convicted at trial. At the
time, he admitted he was aware the scaffolding was dangerous.
"I am deeply sorry to the families who have lost their
loved ones, and to those who are injured," he said yesterday,
reading from a statement. "I am also sorry for the embarrassment
I have caused my family."
Uviller said the case had given her an education in how "astonishingly
ineffectual" the federal government has been in protecting
workers' lives.
The judge pointed out that the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration penalties amount to a $10,000 fine and a maximum
6-month prison sentence for an initial conviction.
Yesterday, the tragedy was still all too fresh for Maria Laura
Cabrera, 28, the widow of Manuel Barariso Atanasio, who also
spoke to the judge through an interpreter. Cabrera said she
still has not been able to bring herself to tell their three
children, ages 9, 6, and 4, who are in Ecuador, that their
father is dead.
"My husband was a good man, a good husband and a good
father," Cabrera said, speaking of how he came to New
York to fulfill their dream of buying a house. "Our dreams
never arrived."
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
Scaffold Scofflaw Gets 10 Years
for 5 Deaths
By Laura Italiano
New York Post
January 15, 2004
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/15793.htm
January 15, 2004 -- The families of five men who died in a
scaffold collapse saw a small measure of justice yesterday
in a Manhattan courtroom, when the deathtrap builder Philip
Minucci was sentenced to up to 10 1/2 years in prison for
recklessly killing them.
One of the men, a 23-year-old laborer from Ecuador, had so
much debris fall onto him he could not draw air into his lungs
- the collapsing scaffolding asphyxiated him.
Minucci, 32, had designed and built a 13-story scaffold for
a demolition job at 215 Park Avenue South. Too flimsy even
to support its own weight, the structure crumpled to the ground
a month after 9/11, killing five laborers and injuring four
others.
"The collapse of this scaffold, designed and built by
Mr. Minucci, was not a tragic accident," Manhattan Supreme
Court Justice Rena Uviller said. "Rather, it was a tragic
certainty."
Minucci was obligated, under city rules and the contract he
signed, to retain an engineer, but instead designed the scaffold
himself, Uviller noted.
His motive was greed, said prosecutor Joel Kosman: He wanted
to save the
$3,000 it would have cost to hire an engineer to do the job
right.
The results were the deaths of Manuel Barariso, Ivan Pillacela,
Efrain Gonzalez, Donato Conde and Fabian Cesar Tenesaca.
"He wanted to work, and only to work," Pillacela's
wife, Patricia Sanchez, 28, told the court. But, "he
used to tell me . . . he was afraid of going up there"
on the scaffolding, she remembered.
Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc.
Metro Briefing -
Manhattan: Sentence in Scaffolding Deaths
New York Times
January 15, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/15/nyregion/15mbrfs.html
A Long Island contractor was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in
prison yesterday for second-degree manslaughter in connection
with the deaths of five construction workers who were killed
when a scaffold collapsed in Gramercy Park in October 2001.
In pleading guilty on Sept. 30, the contractor, Philip V.
Minucci, 32, of Commack, admitted that he had designed the
130-foot-high, 90,000-pound scaffold without following city
building codes. In her sentencing remarks, Justice Rena K.
Uviller of State Supreme Court in Manhattan called Mr. Minucci's
crime "the very definition of manslaughter." By
Susan Saulny (NYT)
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