Philadelphia's Osage Avenue police bombing, 30 years on: 'This story is a parable'

The Guardian ^ | 5/13/2015 | Alan Yuhas

[Borges]

On 13 May 1985, Philadelphia police moved in to arrest four members of a radical black liberation group called Move – but a bungled raid left 11 people dead. Alan Yuhas revisits the only aerial bombing carried out by police on US soil.

Sodden from the spray of fire hoses, terrified by the thousands of bullets fired above and the teargas floating into the cellar below, 13-year-old Michael Ward was hiding under a blanket when a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the roof of his west Philadelphia home.

The raid killed six adults and five children, destroyed more than 60 homes and left more than 250 people homeless. It stands as the only aerial bombing carried out by police on US soil.

The 30-year anniversary of the bombing of Osage Avenue will be commemorated without Ward, who was one of only two survivors of the disastrous assault. Instead professor Cornell West, author Alice Walker and others will give speeches and protesters will march down the crumbling, mostly abandoned block where the bombing took place, drawing ties between police brutality and institutional racism then and now.

[pepsi_junkie]

This discussion prompted me to look up whatever happened to the only kid that survived that fire, Birdie Africa. Turns out he served in the Army and was working as a long distance truck driver so he managed to have a normal life after living with those freaks but he drowned last year.