82-70 Austin Street, Kew Garden, Queens, New York, November 1995
Kitty Genovese was repeatedly stabbed outside her apartment in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964. Thirty-eight people heard her cries for help. Although the attack lasted over half an hour, not a single person called the police until she had died.
Cuyahoga River, Cleveland, Ohio, May 1994
The Cuyahoga River burned for more than an hour on June 22, 1969, after molten slag from a steel mill was dumped into the river and ignited other pollutants.
Morton Thiokol Rocket Testing Facility, Promontory, Utah, August 1994
At this facility the space shuttle's booster rockets were tested. The elastic O-rings in the booster rockets were found to malfunction in cold conditions.
Unusually low temperatures were predicted for the launch of the space shuttle Challenger at Cape Kennedy on January 28, 1986. NASA and Morton Thiokol managers, under pressure to perform on schedule, approved the Challenger's launch. Seven astronauts, including the first civilian crew member, high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, died when the main booster rocket exploded.
4421 Gibson Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, August 1993
On the night of June 7, 1991, nine-year-old Christopher Harris was playing with friends on these steps. Felton Granger, a crack dealer trying to protect himself from a rivel dealer, Marvel Jones, grabbed Harris and used him as a human shield. In the gunfire that ensued, Harris was shot in the back. Friend carried him to a relative's home nearby; he died in the emergency room of a local hospital within an hour. Granger and Jones are serving life sentences for Harris's death.
Imperial Food Products Plant, Hamlet, North Carolina, June 1994
Twenty-five employees died and fifty-six were injured in a fire that swept through this chicken procesing plant on September 3, 1991. Nearly all the victims died of smoke inhalation while trying to escape through exits that were illegally blocked or padlocked. The plant had no fire alarm, no automatic sprinklers, and one fire extinguisher. Emmett J. Roe, owner of Imperial Food Products, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to almost twenty years in prison. Loretta Goodwin, a worker who survived the fire, claimed that the company kept the doors locked to prevent employees from stealing chickens.
The northwest corner of Florence and Normandie Avenues, Los Angeles, California, October 1993
On April 29, 1992, four white police officers on trial for the beating of motorist Rodney King were acquitted. A videotape of King's beating had been extensively televised. The not guilty verdicts became a catalyst for widespread civil unrest.
Riots began with several mob assaults at this intersection. Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, was pulled from his truck and severely beaten as a camera crew broadcast the event live from a news helicopter.
The Los Angeles Riots caused more than fifty deaths and an estimated one billion dollars worth of damage.
Gateway National Recreation Area, Rockaway Peninsula, Queens, New York, September 1993
Almost 300 illegal Chinese immigrants struggled against the pounding surf to reach the shore of the United States on the night of June 6, 1993. Ten died of drowning or hypothermia; the rest escaped or were taken into custody.
The immigrants had endured four and a half months of brutal conditions in transit before their vessel, the Golden Venture, hit a sandbar 200 yards off this beach. They were crammed into a twenty-by-forty-foot hold; food and water were scarce; sanitation conditions were subhuman.
Of those arrested, forty-seven were deported to China, thirty were granted asylum, and forty-six were released. At the end of 1995, 147 were still in federal custody. Lee Peng Fei, the suspected mastermind of the failed voyage, had demanded $30,000 from each would-be immigrant. He was arrested in Bangkok in November 1995.
Arthur Watson Hall, 51 Prospect Street, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, November 1995
David Gelernter, director of computer studies at Yale University and an advocate of the joining of computer sciences with the humanities, was maimed when a packaged bomb exploded in his fifth floor office in Watson Hall on June 24, 1993.
Since 1978, at least three people associated with advanced technology have been killed and twenty-three others injured by bombs sent and placed by a person known as the Unabomber, whose writings express a hatred of technology and fear of its global effects.
In April 1996, the FBI arrested Theodore Kaczynski at his isolated cabin in the mountains of Montana with the belief that he was responsible for these crimes.
200 Northwest 5th Street, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, December 1995
The most lethal act of terrorism in U.S. history occurred here on April 19, 1995. The nine-story Alfred Murrah Federal Building housed seventeen government agencies and a day-care center. At 9:02 A.M., a truck containing more than two tons of fertilizer and fuel oil exploded next to the building, killing 168 people, 15 of them small children. At least 600 others were injured in the blast.
The FBI arrested Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for the bombing. McVeigh, a former Army sergeant, and Nichols, a former member of a paramilitary group known as the Michigan Militia, had spoken about their desire to seek revenge for the attack by the United States Government on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, which had occurred two years earlier. Both men pleaded not guilty.
The Masjid-Al-Rasul, 11211 Central Avenue, Watts, Los Angeles, California, July 1993
In this mosque, members of the Bloods and the Crips, rival Los Angeles gangs, negotiated and signed a truce on April 26, 1992.