BY YANNIC RACK | Two construction managers were charged with manslaughter in the April death of a worker at a Meatpacking District construction site, prosecutors announced last Wednesday.
Carlos Moncayo, a 22-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant who lived in Queens, died April 6 when an unsecured trench in which he was working collapsed and crushed him.
The project managers — Wilmer Cueva, of Sky Materials, and Alfonso Prestia, of Harco Construction — are accused of ignoring repeated warnings about unsafe work conditions at the site, where a Restoration Hardware home-furnishings store is replacing the former tenant, the restaurant Pastis.
“Carlos Moncayo’s death at a construction site was tragic, but it was also foreseeable and avoidable,” Cy Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said at an Aug. 5 news conference, at which he also announced the creation of a task force to help identify and prosecute corruption and fraud in the construction industry.
The two managers, as well as their companies, were charged with second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment.
City and state regulations mandate that any excavations deeper than five feet be fortified by either shoring them up with barriers or sloping the trench walls outward.
But the managers allegedly failed to react to multiple red flags at 9-19 Ninth Ave., where the trenches had lacked these security precautions for months, according to e-mail records from an inspection service cited by prosecutors.
On the morning of the accident, a separate inspector noticed a seven-foot-deep trench that was unprotected and subsequently alerted both Prestia and Cueva that no workers should be allowed inside the pit, according to prosecutors.
Around an hour later, the same inspector witnessed four workers inside the unfortified trench, which was now 13 feet deep. According to the statement, he again reported the situation to both managers, but this time Cueva flat-out refused to halt the work.
Prestia eventually did tell the workers to leave the trench, according to prosecutors, but they didn’t understand his instructions, given in English.
When he allegedly repeated them in Spanish about 20 minutes later, it came too late for Moncayo, who only moments later was buried under a mountain of dirt.
The New York Times reported that all the defendants pleaded not guilty in Manhattan State Supreme Court on Aug. 5.
