American Notes Philadelphia

Mayor Wilson Goode's handpicked commission was stunningly impartial. "The plan to bomb the Move house was reckless, ill conceived and hastily approved," the panel concluded last week in its report on the May 1985 siege of a radical group in West Philadelphia. The mayor and his top aides were "grossly negligent" in pursuing the confrontation, the report stated. The bomb, dropped by police helicopter on a fortified row house, led to a fire that destroyed 61 homes and killed six Move members and five of their children. The children's deaths, the panel said, "appear to be unjustified homicides." The commission also commented that the bombing would not have happened had the house been in a "comparable white neighborhood." Goode replied that he hopes the voters will not judge him "on one day and one event."