Guilty When Black. Carol Mersch
had been living in shelters. His mother worked in a nursing home and was told by the officers her license would be revoked if she were arrested. She pleaded with her son to go along with the proposition. The implications were onerous.
When he refused to implicate Miashah at the preliminary hearing, McAmis threatened to impeach him with the officers' statements at the jury trial.54
At this point, legal trap doors mysteriously began to open out of nowhere.
Court records show that when Williams appeared on the drug charge five days later, his public defender abruptly resigned. The judge then ordered him to reappear in 30 days with a private attorney. When Williams dutifully reappeared on April 15, but without an attorney, the judge ordered him taken into custody, and he was placed in a holding chair in the courtroom to await booking into the county jail. Somewhere between the holding chair and his actual arrest, however, Williams disappeared from the courtroom. On April 24, 2014 DA Tim Harris issued a bench warrant for his arrest.55
But the question of who, if anybody, was responsible for the deaths of Noni and Nylah was more complicated
11
String of fires
THE #716 inferno was only the latest in a long string of fires that had plagued the complex for years. If fire reports were any indication, London Square had become a Virtual incinerator—a scrap pile of outdated wiring, breaker boxes, and patchwork electrical repairs made well before the latest city electrical codes.
But the low-income families in London Square could hardly afford to complain for fear of losing one of the few affordable roofs over their head. Only two months before the #716 fire, a September 2013 fire in building 400 displaced a dozen families when a tenant, Latoya Berry, was frying chicken and witnessed the stove suddenly erupt into flames. “I don’t know what happened,” Berry said. “I was cooking, it flamed up. I put flour on it. It went everywhere.”
In building 500, five people barely escaped their apartment on March 5, 2007, when a bedroom wall inexplicably burst into flames. inexplicably burst into flames on March 5, 2010. The fire started on the second level of the apartment complex and quickly spread into the attic. Wooden shingles on the roof made controlling the fire difficult. The fire also spread to the basement, where buckets of paint and other cleaning supplies burst into flames. Firemen had to force open several doors and windows to get residents out. At one point, a police officer carried a baby to safety. Sixty people were displaced by the fire. Its cause was listed as “Undetermined.”
On February 10, 2007, a fire in building 400 ripped through 27 units. At least 15 families were displaced, and some were left homeless. The fire quickly engulfed a large section of the two-story building from the attic to the basement. Anita Hamblin lived in unit #404 directly beneath the second-story fire and was gone when it broke out. “I ended up moving because [the Tulsa Fire Department] wouldn’t let me back in my apartment. Everything I owned was smoke-damaged,” she said. Again, the cause of the fire was listed as “Undetermined.”
Tulsa Fire Department records show a total of nine building fires in London Square since 2002, although internal accounts reveal other fires since the fire in #716 were handled internally by the maintenance crew and never reported.
Allen Gorenflo, a handyman electrician and long-time resident at London Square, was often called upon to do electrical work. He was among the last to work on #716 prior to its rental to the Moses sisters in 2013. “I lived in the same building. That’s the last unit I worked on.”
When asked to inspect a dysfunctional ceiling fan in the bedroom of #716, he traced it to a hard-wired smoke detector on the same circuit and said something about the breaker box “didn’t look right.” He abandoned the project after a London Square maintenance supervisor instructed him to tape electric wires together behind the oven’s back wall rather than cap them in a junction box as required by code.
“I may not be a licensed electrician, but I’ve got 30 years’ experience, and I don’t do things that way,” Gorenflo said.
He recalled another time when London Square asked that he swap out a number of stove vent hoods. He never asked why but suspected that it had something to do with the overhead grease trap adjacent to the ceiling light’s electrical wires. He noted that clogged grease traps are highly combustible. If overloaded, the wiring to the light could arc and cause a flashover to the grease trap, which could cause the vent hood to erupt into flames, before traveling through the wiring to the electric oven and down the hall to the breaker box.
When he first moved into London Square, Gorenflo said he had his entire oven replaced after he lifted up the stove top and observed a half-inch layer of grease beneath the burner.
“I don’t think they ever inspected #716,” he said. “I think a lot of things were swept under the rug.”
Allen Gorenflo was not alone in his observations of electrical problems at London Square. A closer look at London Square revealed a plethora of potential causes. By late 2014, as legal proceedings against Miashah dragged on, publicity about the case had reached social media and others were taking note.
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