A death. A cover-up. ProPublica documents how an immigrant met a terrible end in the Bronx

The body of the young man lay in the middle of Jerome Avenue beneath the elevated train tracks, the scene lit by the neon blue sign above the shuttered El Caribe restaurant. A garbage truck sat mid-turn at the otherwise deserted intersection in the Bronx.

Emergency medical personnel arrived, records show, and pronounced the young man dead at 5:08 a.m. on Nov. 7, 2017.

The police came, too. Officers taped off the scene, and interviewed the truck driver and his assistant, according to records and interviews. The driver and helper, according to the police report, said the dead man was a stranger who had inexplicably jumped on the truck’s passenger side running board, lost his grip and was run over. The initial police report left blank the spot for the young man’s name.

Within hours, a Bronx News12 reporter said neighbors thought the victim was “a homeless man that they’ve seen in the area.” By afternoon, he was “a daredevil homeless man” in the Daily News.

The garbage truck belonged to Sanitation Salvage, among the largest commercial trash haulers in the city. A company supervisor eventually came to retrieve the truck and take it back to the company yard. Then, according to workers told about the night’s events, it was promptly sent back out without so much as a cleaning.

Two miles south of the accident, in a Bronx apartment off the Grand Concourse, a mother waited for her son. Hadiatou Barry, a Guinean immigrant, had come to the Bronx for a better life for her family. Her eldest son, Mouctar Diallo, 21, had a bed in the living room of their apartment. The young man often worked nights, and with the sun coming up should have been home asleep. But his bed remained empty.

Soon enough, Hadiatou Barry got the worst sort of news, a double-barreled blow of devastation and insult.

Mouctar Diallo’s nighttime job had been as an informal helper on garbage trucks owned by Sanitation Salvage, and the truck he’d been working on that night had killed him. Then, she learned, the truck’s driver and main helper — men who’d known him for more than a year and paid him off-the-books for his help hauling trash to the curb — had claimed not to know him. The rest of the city now knew her son only as a homeless person.

“He is my son, and I want the truth for him,” Hadiatou Barry said in a recent interview. “In order for it to not happen to somebody else.”

Off the books

The truth of Mouctar Diallo’s death is that the authorities investigating the accident did not learn that he was a worker on the truck for at least two months, and that when they did, they took no action against the driver and helper who had lied to police.

The Business Integrity Commission, the New York City agency charged with oversight of the commercial garbage industry, allowed both the driver and main helper to keep working. The police and Bronx prosecutors closed their investigation with no criminal charges.

Repeat offense

On April 27, Sean Spence, the Sanitation Salvage driver who authorities say ran over Diallo and lied about it, struck and killed another man, 72–yearold Leo Clarke. Clarke, walking with a cane, was crossing in the middle of a Bronx block Friday evening when he was crushed by the 40-ton truck. A police investigation is underway, and Spence now has been suspended from driving for Sanitation Salvage.

“Oh my God,” Hadiatou Barry said when told of Spence’s involvement in the second fatality.

The New York Police Department said lying to the police was not a crime. The department maintains it did a thorough investigation, collecting witness statements, 911 calls and videotape from the scene. The police, a spokesman said, had no authority to investigate the operations of a private sanitation company.

A spokeswoman for the Bronx district attorney said the Business Integrity Commission had made no criminal referral to prosecutors about the conduct of Sanitation Salvage’s employees and thus prosecutors had no cause to investigate further.

The Business Integrity Commission’s spokesperson said the commission was alerted to the possibility that the November death involved a worker in early January, during a meeting with labor advocates about conditions at Sanitation Salvage. The fact that it was Diallo who had been killed had been an open secret among the workers for months. Commission officials said they then confronted Spence and his chief helper, Chris Bourke, and that the two men confessed to having invented the tale of an unknown pedestrian jumping on the truck.

This story was co-published with Voice of America.