“This is America”: The Day Police Firebombed West Philadelphia

By the time Lt. Frank Powell hurled a satchel bomb onto the roof of a three-story row house on Philadelphia’s Osage Avenue, the siege had gone on for nearly twelve hours. Powell was a member of the Philadelphia PD’s bomb squad, and like the “firemen” in Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novelette, he was performing a function assumed to be the opposite of his expected role: Rather than disposing of a military-grade bomb, he was using it as a weapon of mass destruction.

The building targeted by Powell was occupied by members of a militant group called The MOVE.  Aerial photographs taken shortly before the May 13, 1985 assault displayed a weapons bunker and large containers of oil on the roof of the row house. So it wasn’t at all surprising that a few seconds after Powell heaved his bomb from the open door of a State Police helicopter, a huge orange fireball erupted from the top of the building. The uncontained fire consumed that house and sixty others, leaving the entire neighborhood a smoldering ruin. 

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