NYC Crane Collapse: Criminal Negligence?

After monitoring the news for a bit, I decided to address this disaster in this blog. I am, in part, plagiarizing myself, as some of this post will mirror an update I appended to the entry about twisters near Atlanta (I live in the Atlanta area) at Random Lunatic News.

According to the New York Times, a massive crane has crashed down onto several buildings in Manhattan. At least 4 people were killed, maybe more. The Times gave the location as "303 East 51st Street, near Second Avenue." The link in the preceding quote takes you to a webpage that appears to advertise the condo under construction at that address.

Fox News has reported that a number of people at FUBAR (alternate link, in case the page is removed or deleted), a bar located at 305 E. 50th St., were killed in this collapse.

Fox has mentioned quotes from people living in the area around the collapse about the building where the crane was in use being built "way too fast." There are reports of multiple violations at the construction site. Someone may end up in prison over this.

Google's Street View pointed towards FUBAR's location is embedded at the bottom of this post. You can click on the image to travel up and down the street or get a 360-degree view of various locations.

This entry will be revised and expanded.

UPDATE

WNBC in New York notes that there were 9 'open violations' against the building site in question. One interesting complaint was filed against the site on March 4, but inspection two days after the filing seemed to indicate there was no violation:

1) CALLER STATES, CRANE DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE BRACED TO THE BUILDING. THERE ONLY TIE BACKS ON 5 OR 6 FLOOR BUT UPPER PART WHICH IS 100 FT UP IS UNSECURED

Filed 3/4/2008 Inspection: 03/06/2008 - - I2 - NO VIOLATION WARRANTED FOR COMPLAINT AT TIME OF INSPECTION Comments: CRANE IS ERECTED ACCORDING TO APPROVED CN. #39/08, CD#3774

UPDATE 2

Thanks to reader KatK for pointing this out.

On March 7, a reader using the screen name "stuyguy" posted the following question on the StraightDope.com message boards:

My city is having a building boom like never before. All over the place there are cranes in the sky, perched atop these slender pipe-frame towers. They are casually moving what seem like enormous loads over the heads of workers and pedestrians while all around the worksite busy urban life goes on.

I have no formal knowledge about how these machines work, but I assume that when an airborne crane picks up a load, some counterwieght mechanism is tugging on the other side of it, keeping the center of gravity of the whole package squarely on top of the tower. (If this is wrong, please correct me and I'll be quiet and go on my merry way.)

So, what would happen if the hoist cable (or one of the chains or straps around the load*) snapped? Suddenly there would be no counterforce to balance the crane's lopsided weight. Are those framework towers anchored sufficiently to withstand such a "shove"?

Today, "stuyguy" started a new thread:

The crane that prompted me to ask the question was one that was being used on a construction site down the block from where I live, here in Manhattan. There was nothing in particular about this crane that made me think it was unsafe. It's just that seeing it every day made me speculate if it could ever fall.

Well, today it did! Not one just like it. Not one nearby. The very same crane!

[...]

I was sitting in my apt when I heard the rumble outside. I looked out the window to see what made the noise, but I found nothing out of the ordinary. I went on the roof, and there was a huge cloud of dust looming in the east. Police cars and fire trucks were soon converging on the scene. I went to the street and spent most of the afternoon at the disaster site. Sadly, there were at least 4 deaths, and my favorite bar, Fubar, was totally destroyed.

What a freaky coincidence!

No kidding. Freaky may be too mild a word, at that.


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The Spitzer Scandal *UPDATED*

CHECK THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST FOR AN UPDATE, ADDED 3/13/08. This entry was originally published 3/10, and has been updated for today to keep it at the top of the index page.

If you haven't already heard, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (D) has some 'splainin' to do. Quoting from the New York Times:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who gained national prominence relentlessly pursuing Wall Street wrongdoing, has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation...

That's right, the Governor of New York, once a hardassed, vice-prosecuting attorney general, may have been doing some high-class whoring.

The "escort service" that allegedly "serviced" Gov. Spitzer (AKA 'Client 9') was Emperors Club VIP. I've got a post up on Radar's "Fresh Intelligence" weblog about how the club's web presence evolved over time:

"A Look at the Emperors Club."

Nothing earth-shattering, but it may be enlightening, at the very least. Do not visit some of the links from my Radar post if you're surfing from work. Please recommend the entry it if you find it interesting.

Additional link: Affidavit related to the case.

UPDATE, 3/13/08

I work for my readers. That's why I can provide you with the following records of some web pages worth noting in relation to this story. They are all of alleged Spitzer call girl Ashley Dupre's MySpace pages as they appeared about 24 hours ago, give or take. I sent all these docs to an editor at Radar last night, as well. (Here's the entry where "Fresh Intelligence" utilized some of the files.)

I was waiting to see if Ms. Dupre would delete her "Nina Venetta" music profile and the associated blog. After thousands of (often hilarious) blog comments and hearings of her songs, she deleted the account sometime early this afternoon. It was interesting while it lasted.

The following documents are pdfs, and since that format is notoriously difficult to load in a Web browser, I've provided a route to loading the links easily, through PDFMeNot.com. The original pdf docs are hosted by my True Crime Magazine server. To see those, just remove the PDFMeNot portion of the link. To navigate any PDFMeNot file, just move the slider on the top right side of the page to enlarge the image, and click the radio buttons to page through each document. The last file, for example (#4), is 10 pages -- if you're not aware that you need to navigate that way, you may think the pdf has been truncated.

• NinaVenetta 1. (I mis-typed the name of the file when I made it.)
• NinaVenetta 2. (Google cached the page prior to March 12.)
  
• NinaVenetta 3.
  
• NinaVenetta 4. (The first 30-odd comments left on the blog included.)

UPDATE 2

Weirdly, it looks as though MySpace "accidentally" deleted Dupre's "Nina Venetta" pages. They've been restored:

http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta
http://blog.myspace.com/ninavenetta

Do yourself a favor and read the comments on the blog. They are priceless, if you're ever inclined to schadenfreude.

Murder at the University of Arkansas: Takatak and the Insubstantial Pageant

From the Northwest Arkansas Times:

What began as a welfare check Sunday morning led to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol arresting a Fayetteville man suspected of killing a University of Arkansas student.

Zachariah Marcyniuk, 28, faces a charge of first-degree murder for the death of Katherine Wood, 24.

After receiving calls about a disturbance at the Colonial Arms Apartments on 1211 N. Leverett Ave. in Fayetteville, police found a purse outside the complex. The contents of the purse led them to Apt. 11, where they found Katherine Wood, deceased. Less than an hour later, police began seeking Zachariah Scott Marcyniuk. Marcyniuk had some sort of relationship with Katherine Wood, and he had a criminal history.

Writing as takatak777 (for you intrepid reporters ganking this blog's research: link goes to an entry where Marcyniuk posted his name, address, and phone numbers) on Livejournal, Marcyniuk devoted one of his first blog posts to one of the events in 2005 that netted him time in the Fayetteville court system. He'd had a bad breakup with someone named Sarah, and for whatever reason, Marcyniuk made things worse:

this is the official story, in black and white: Two weeks ago I broke into HER apartment, when she wasnae (sic) there, in order to retrieve MY stuff (items that were mine, not items that I had given to her as gifts and such). The cops came knocking as I was trying to fix the doorjamb, after I had swept up the mess on the kitchen floor. With four guns in my face I was arrested for breaking and entering, and attempted theft of property...

Marcyniuk described his jail stay. He then tried to explain himself, seemingly blaming his ex in the process:

So how does one come to this? Why did I do what I did? For some, the answer is easy to understand (as they have been there before), for others it's incomprehensible. I think she knows why this happened, because she understands me all too well, and she knows (somewhere deep inside) that her actions were going to hurt me eventually. Right now, I can say with all honesty that, besides the split second I actually used my forearm to force the deadbolt to seperate from the wall, I was never all that angry. Just hurt, and wanting to make a clean break (that she wouldn't let me have) from her.

Fayetteville Police were unclear as to the relationship between Marcyniuk and murder victim Katherine "Katie" Wood, but alleged killer and victim knew each other well. Marcyniuk was in Wood's top friends, and he'd left numerous comments on Wood's MySpace profile (link to copy of the page). She was also in his list of friends and a frequent commenter on his page, where she left images and YouTube videos in addition to what appeared to be responses to messages Marcyniuk left for her.

Wood also blogged on MySpace, titling her page "insubstantial pageant." She wrote an entry on January 4, 2007 that could have been in reference to Marcyniuk, who was fond of Kung Fu movies:

I've waited four days for this, but here it is: the obligatory New Years blog.

So 2006, what is there to say...it's over, but it was good. In fact, it was pretty damn good. I made it through what was probably my most difficult semester of classes with no serious GPA indentions, made a lot of artistic progress, and even managed to build on my personal life. (girls, when the cute ticket guy badgers you about the world cup, badger him right back, accept his tekken challenge, and pretend to have a vague interest in kung fu films...it works everytime).

Katie Wood was an English major at the University of Arkansas. One of the last entries she posted in her MySpace weblog in October of last year hinted at the writer inside:

It will be difficult to force myself to go to class, it will be impossible to stay awake if I succeed in attendance. Weather like this is only good for sitting on a squishy couch and flipping through magazines while drinking tea until you fall asleep to the quietness. All I can think about is a blanket made of purple yarn (every cool, rainy day should be dedicated to old lady's who knit) and the solitary yellow glow of a lamp near the sofa. I'd give anything to escape this incandescent lighting...

While Zachariah Marcyniuk had an extensive presence on the Web (see the end of the entry), his abandoned Livejournal may have been the most revealing document he left online. Marcyniuk spoke constantly of his ex, Sarah, even after he'd begun doing community service for convictions related to his actions after their breakup. Much of what he wrote sounded like the ramblings of a stalker:

way to go for stubby, ugly guys Sarah, really...he's smaller than I am, for Buddha's sake!!...and twitchy (but really, his short limbs are what stuck out to me - just like Tommy)...and, well, he's just an unattractive douchebag - end of story, but you seem to specialize in that kind of guy recently...there's not much to him, but that's probably how you want it right now...I thought it was really funny how he was trying to appear threatening with his little stencil knife...

[...]

Wanna see how much those other guys care about you?..How many of them have really tried to get you to go back to school?..How many of them say 'No, let's NOT drink or smoke pot anymore, or go to some pointless stupid party or bar, and let's start getting our shit together'?...How many?..What - NONE OF THEM?..Well, that's how much they care about you Sarah - I respect you enough to want YOU to make yourself a better person...

Other posts around the same time in Marcyniuk's LJ indicate he was actually doing community service for the crimes he committed after breaking up with the woman with whom he was still obviously obsessed.

Was Zachariah Marcyniuk stalking Katie Wood? It doesn't seem a stretch to ask the question, for it seems like he didn't learn much of a lesson from his run-ins with the law after breaking up with another woman 3 years ago.

The Arkansas State Medical Examiner will determine the cause of Katie Wood's death. Zachariah Marcyniuk was being held in Oklahoma late Sunday, pending his return to Arkansas to face a charge of 1st degree murder.

UPDATE, 12:02 p.m. ET

Thanks to Monika for pointing this link out in a comment: "Katie Wood." The link goes to a blog at ZenandJuice.com. The blogger was apparently friends with Katie Wood. She wrote about her friend's death and in the process she clarified Zach's and Katie's relationship: "The last time that I talked to [Katie] was Thursday March 6th, around 12:30pm. She IM’d me, asking me if I could call her phone, because she couldn’t find it. There was no answer - it went directly to voicemail.

"She said that she suspected that Zach took it, and he’d been 'acting crazy'. They had been dating for awhile, and recently broke up, but were still friends. While we were talking, Zach wrote her back saying that he didn’t take it and had no idea where it was."

Sources, links:

• "Suspect Arrested in Apparent Homicide" ~ The Arkansas Traveler, online edition.
• http://takatak777.deviantart.com/ -- Marcyniuk's Deviant Art page.
• http://takatak.buzznet.com/user/ -- Zachariah Marcyniuk's Buzznet profile.

The Ultimate True Crime Tale: Jack the Ripper

In May this year a major exhibition will open at the Museum in Docklands, London -- "Jack the Ripper and the East End." From the museum webpage about the exhibition:

From police files and photographs to letters from the public and the supposed Ripper himself, examine, for the first time, surviving documents and artefacts from the investigation and follow the crimes as they unfolded...

Few unsolved cases out there have sparked as much interest as the brief spree of prostitute murders committed by an unknown killer in London in 1888. A fictionalized account of the Ripper's crimes once put this line in the killer's mouth: "One day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century."

Though the words were a writer's creation, they were true, in a way. There was something undeniably modern in the way this serial killer was covered by the media at the time. The fact that today there is still interest in an exhibition tells you how media exploitation of the fear generated by the Ripper's crimes made a lasting impression all over the world. It's not like there weren't other sprees before and after the Ripper. Here in the Atlanta area we had our own "Ripper" between 1909 and 1911 (link goes to a blog post I wrote 4 years ago for the Atlanta Metroblog). A killer described as a "well-dressed" black man preyed on light-skinned black women. He may have killed as many as 20 young women before he was done.

The Atlanta killer was even called a "Ripper" by papers at the time. So just twenty some odd years after the fact, Jack's legacy was alive and well in the Atlanta press, too. The "Ripper" appellation has been trotted out by reporters on a regular basis for 120 years now, thanks to Jack. Only the American Zodiac Killer even comes close to the Ripper for lasting interest in an unsolved series of murders. In addition to killing in a random, brutal manner, both Zodiac and the Ripper were media whores, taunting the public with letters, and in the case of the Zodiac, coded messages (there's a lot of controversy over the Ripper's letters -- many Ripper messages were believed to be hoaxes at the time of the murders).

A trip to the Docklands museum would permit an unique look at the Ripper murders as they happened, and perhaps even provide some new insight. For those who know the case well, the documents on display might even raise new questions about who the killer really was. Countless theories have been floated, but none of them could ever truly be proven.

Whoever he was, Jack the Ripper crossed long ago from true crime history into legend. Today he's more like a mythical monster, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Wolfman and Frankenstein's Monster. The real police documents about the case might provide a look at the Ripper when he was just another blood-soaked shadow flitting around a corner in the fog-shrouded night. A window into the time before that shadow grew into something even more monstrous, the embodiment of a nightmare.

And for some, a sick inspiration.

Additional link: Casebook.org -- the most comprehensive site on the Web about the Ripper.