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Nadeem Anwar, age 48 of Valley Stream, and his company – City Wide Construction and Renovations, Inc. – were convicted on Tuesday, May 14, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced.
The conviction comes five years after Alysson Pinto-Chaumana, age 5, was killed in front of her mother when a wall fell on her in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
In September 2018, the Brooklyn DA said Anwar, as a licensed contractor, was hired to renovate the facade of 444 Harman Street, a three-story building. During this renovation, he built a granite wall that enclosed the patio, which had a base of heavy stone pillars topped with stone horizontal plates.
Less than a year later, Pinto-Chaumana was with her mother and several friends on the patio visiting friends when the pillars and horizontal plates suddenly fell inward on the young girl, crushing her skull and causing her death.
According to the DA, Anwar committed numerous violations of the New York City Building Code while building the stone fence; although he was licensed as a contractor in Nassau County, he was not authorized to file for work permits with the NYC Department of Buildings (DOB).
Because of this, the DA said he had another contractor file the application for the work on the façade, but not for building the wall.
A DOB engineer who responded to the collapse noted there were no steel reinforcing bars in any of the pillars, nor was there any engineer-grade adhesive securing the wall’s component parts.
The wall, the engineer said, was highly unstable and held together mostly by its own weight and gravity, which they described as “imminently perilous to life.”
Additionally, Anwar did not obtain a required DOB permit for the stone wall, nor did he have a licensed engineer or architect conduct a post-construction analysis of the wall’s stability (another requirement).
“The death of Alysson Pinto-Chaumana was completely preventable,” said New York City Department of Buildings Commissioner James Oddo.
“Simply put, if this contractor had obtained permits for the work to build this railing, and adhered to our city’s construction code regulations, this young girl would still be alive today.”
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez added, “This is a heartbreaking instance where a young child was needlessly and senselessly taken from her family.”
Anwar was convicted of the following charges after a bench trial:
- Criminally negligent homicide;
- Offering a false instrument for filing; and
- Falsifying business records.
He is due back in court for sentencing on Wednesday, Aug. 14.
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