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Nadeem Anwar, age 48, of Valley Stream, was sentenced to six months behind bars and five years of probation in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Wednesday, Sept. 18, in the death of Alysson Pinto-Chaumana.
According to prosecutors, the young girl was with her mother visiting a friend’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on Aug. 29, 2019, when a granite wall made of several stone pillars and a horizontal stone plate toppled onto her. The child suffered severe head trauma and died.
An investigation found that Anwar's Valley Stream company, City Wide Construction and Renovations, had been hired to renovate the home’s facade and build the wall in September 2018.
Although he was licensed as a contractor in Nassau County, he was not authorized to file for work permits with the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB), and had another contractor file the application, prosecutors said.
During construction, he committed numerous violations of the New York City Building Code, including failing to have a licensed engineer or architect conduct a post-construction analysis of the wall’s stability.
A DOB engineer who responded to the collapse determined there were no steel reinforcing bars in any of the pillars, as is required. The wall also lacked the necessary engineer-grade adhesive that would have secured its components.
“Therefore, he determined, the wall was highly unstable and held together mostly by its own weight and gravity, an egregious violation of multiple provisions of the Building Code,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzales said.
The engineer described the conditions as “imminently perilous to life.”
On May 14 – nearly five years after Alysson’s death – a Brooklyn jury convicted Anwar and his company of criminally negligent homicide, offering a false instrument for filing, and falsifying business records.
“This defendant’s egregious failure to follow the most basic safety provisions of the New York City Building Code caused the horrific, brutal and completely avoidable death of little Alysson, leaving her devastated mother heartbroken,” Gonzales said.
“Today’s sentence sends a message that there will be serious consequences for contractors whose sloppy work endangers the public.”
Following Alysson’s death, and that of another child under similar circumstances in the Bronx in 2021, the Department of Buildings began doing public outreach warning of the dangers associated with improper construction of stone walls.
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