FBI Special Agent Michael Macys drove 30 blocks of C4 plastic explosive into Philadelphia in January 1985, four months before the city dropped that same C4 on a Black neighborhood from a helicopter. He carried 37 and a half pounds of military-grade explosive. Nobody at the FBI had ordered the delivery. Nobody at the Philadelphia Police Department had requested it. Neither agency kept a single piece of paper documenting the transfer. Four months later, on May 13th, 1985, Lieutenant Frank Powell of the Philadelphia Bomb Squad assembled a satchel charge using one block from that same stockpile. A Pennsylvania State Police helicopter hovered 60 feet above 6221 Osage Avenue. Powell lit a 45-second fuse. He dropped the bomb at 5:28 in the evening. Eleven people died inside that house. Five of them were children.

The standard account of the MOVE bombing calls it a desperate tactical decision made in the heat of a long siege. The FBI’s own records tell a different story. The bomb had been sitting in a Philadelphia Police Academy locker since January 1985, waiting for a reason to be used. That is what an October 1985 letter from the FBI’s Philadelphia field office confirms — and that letter is why this accounting exists.

Who MOVE Was and What the System Did Before the Helicopter

MOVE was founded in 1972 by a Korean War veteran named Vincent Leaphart, who renamed himself John Africa. The organization started as the Christian Movement for Life in West Philadelphia. Africa wrote a foundational doctrine he called the Guidelines — a 300-page text that rejected what he described as synthetic education. Everyone in MOVE took the surname Africa: children, adults, entire generations, one family name.

By the early 1980s, MOVE was operating out of a rowhouse at 6221 Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood. They lived communally, ate a vegan diet, homeschooled their children, advocated for animal rights, and practiced armed neighborhood defense from a megaphone-equipped rooftop bunker. To the city of Philadelphia, MOVE was a public nuisance. To the FBI and the Philadelphia Police Department, MOVE was something else.

By 1978, MOVE members had been arrested 193 times across 93 open court cases. In August 1978, Philadelphia police raided a MOVE compound in Powelton Village. Officer James Ramp was killed in the firefight. Nine MOVE members were convicted of his murder. They became known as the MOVE Nine. Among them were the mothers of three children who would later die in the May 1985 bombing. Those mothers were in state prison when their children burned. That was the institutional record before the helicopter took off.

January 1985: The Delivery Nobody Recorded

In January 1985, FBI Special Agent Michael Macys loaded 30 blocks of C4 plastic explosive — one and a quarter pounds each, 37 and a half pounds total — into a vehicle. He drove the explosive from the FBI’s Philadelphia field office to the Philadelphia Police Academy. He also carried several sticks of Tovex TR2, a DuPont commercial mining explosive that the manufacturer had never authorized for above-ground use. Macys handed all of it over to the Philadelphia Police Department bomb squad. Then he left.

No one had requested the delivery. The Philadelphia Police had not asked for explosives. There was no MOVE confrontation actively scheduled in January 1985. The standoff that would consume Osage Avenue was four months away. Macys did not file paperwork on the transfer. The Philadelphia Police Department did not file paperwork either.

The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission — impaneled by Mayor Wilson Goode after the bombing and chaired by Attorney William H. Brown III — would later try to reconstruct the chain of custody for the C4. The commission’s final report, released March 6th, 1986, contained one of the strangest sentences in any government investigation report in American history. The commission wrote: “Delivery of this amount of C4 to any local police force without restrictions as to its use is inappropriate. Neither agency kept any records of the transaction.”

Macys told the commission that he never had to keep any kind of records or anything regarding C4. He also told the commission he had made the delivery while, in his own words, “in fear of losing my job.” He did not explain what he was afraid of.

May 13th, 1985: How the Bomb Was Built

May 13th, 1985 was scheduled. The standoff was not improvised. Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, had authorized the operation. His managing director was Leo A. Brooks, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general. His police commissioner was Gregor J. Sambor. His fire commissioner was William C. Richmond.

By 5:00 in the afternoon, MOVE was still inside the house. Sambor and Brooks had retreated to a temporary command post on the ninth floor of a nearby geriatric center, watching their own city burn through a window. Powell and his bomb squad were on the street at Pine Street and Cobbs Creek Parkway building the satchel charge.

When Powell and his bomb squad assembled the device that afternoon, they began with two tubes of Tovex from the January delivery. Officer William Klene looked at the assembly and decided it was not enough. On his own authority, Klene added one block — one and a quarter pounds — of the FBI’s C4 to the top of the satchel. The combined device contained a commercial mining explosive never approved for above-ground use, plus one block of pre-positioned military plastic explosive that nobody at either agency could account for on paper.

At 5:20 in the afternoon, a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter took off. At 5:28, Powell dropped the bomb. The detonation ignited a gasoline-powered generator on the roof. The DuPont specifications for the Tovex and C4 combination listed a detonation temperature range of 300 to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. An eyewitness in a neighboring building described the fireball that engulfed the rooftop bunker as reaching 7,200 degrees. Within 20 minutes the rowhouse was on fire. Within the hour, 61 homes across two city blocks were burning. By the end of the night, 250 people were homeless.

Eleven people inside the MOVE house were dead. The five children were Tomaso Africa, age 9; Phil Africa, age 11; Delicia Africa, age 12; Netta Africa, age 12; and Tree Africa, also known as Katrisha Dotson, age 14.

The Fire Was an Instrument

Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond testified under oath that the firefighters had been ordered to delay response. He said the plan was to drive the people out of the house, and that firefighting was deliberately withheld for that reason. The fire was not a consequence of the explosion. It was part of the design.

Finding 28 of the MOVE Commission final report reads: “Police gunfire in the rear alley prevented the escape from the fire of some occupants of the MOVE house.” Police were shooting at the survivors. They were shooting at children running from a fire the city had refused to extinguish.

Two days after the bombing, on May 15th, 1985, a reporter asked Lieutenant Frank Powell whether the device had contained military plastic explosive. Powell said on the record that they did not have any C4. He said he would like to have it, and that the only place they could purchase it was in Canada and it was extremely expensive. That statement was a lie. Three months later, on August 8th, 1985, Philadelphia’s managing director, James S. White, publicly admitted the device had contained C4 after all. Then came October 22nd, 1985, and a letter signed by Wayne G. Davis, the FBI special agent in charge of the Philadelphia field office, confirming the C4 had come from the FBI and that Agent Macys had been the one who delivered it.

After the bombing, the FBI retrieved its C4 stockpile from the police academy. When they counted what they got back, six pounds were missing. Davis confirmed the loss in his October letter. Six pounds of military plastic explosive walked out of a Philadelphia police facility, and the FBI’s only record of the explosive ever being there in the first place was a letter written eight months after the fact.

The Commission’s Verdict and What Followed

The MOVE Commission delivered its full verdict on March 6th, 1986. The report described the operation as reckless, ill-conceived, and hastily approved. The decision to drop a bomb on an occupied rowhouse it called unconscionable. It found Sambor and Brooks grossly negligent. It found Mayor Goode grossly negligent for failing to halt the operation when he knew children were inside.

Commissioner Charles Bowser, one of the panel’s most senior members, addressed the racial dimension directly. Bowser wrote that Goode and Brooks did not shoot 10,000 bullets into that house. They did not put military explosives into the bomb. They did not decide to let the bunker burn and they did not shoot at children trying to escape the fire. “I know none of that would have happened in a white neighborhood,” he wrote, “and so do you.”

Two grand juries were convened — one local, one federal. Both declined to bring criminal charges against any government actor. Sambor resigned in November 1985. Powell stayed with the department. Goode won reelection in 1988. The only person ever disciplined for the C4 was Special Agent Macys. The discipline came on April 18th, 1989 — four years after the bombing. Macys was suspended 30 days without pay. The suspension was not for the unauthorized transfer. It was for withholding information about the transfer from federal investigators afterward. He was never criminally charged. He kept his job.

In June 1996, a federal civil jury awarded Ramona Africa and the families of two bombing victims $1.5 million. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in Africa v. City of Philadelphia, held that dropping a bomb on a person’s home was not a Fourth Amendment seizure. The individual officials received qualified immunity. The city paid the settlement.

The Bones That Kept Moving

In 1985, partial remains of two MOVE children were routed through the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office. On September 23rd, 1986, a box of those remains was walked from the Medical Examiner’s Office to the University of Pennsylvania Museum. The receiving curator’s doctoral adviser, Penn anthropologist Alan Mann, took the bones with him when he moved to Princeton in 2001. The remains belonged in part to Tree Africa — Katrisha Dotson, 14 years old — and included partial remains of Delicia Africa, 12 years old. For nearly 40 years, those bones moved between Penn and Princeton anthropology departments.

In 2019, a course instructor used them as a case study in an online Coursera teaching video titled Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology. Tree’s mother, who had been imprisoned during the bombing, did not know. In 2017, Philadelphia Health Commissioner Thomas Farley discovered additional MOVE remains in a medical examiner’s storage box. Without notifying the victims’ families, he ordered the remains cremated. The remains were not actually cremated. When the story broke in April 2021, Farley resigned — on May 13th, 2021, exactly 36 years after the bombing.

On November 14th, 2024, the Penn Museum announced the discovery of additional MOVE remains it had previously denied possessing — believed to belong to Delicia Africa. In March 2025, the city of Philadelphia settled with Delicia’s brother, Lionel Dotson, for $250,000. Two months later, Penn settled separately.

Ramona Africa was the only adult who escaped the burning house. She ran out the back, severely burned, into the same alley where police were firing. She was arrested. Charged with riot and conspiracy. Convicted. She served a full seven years because parole would have required her to dissociate from MOVE, and she refused. She was released on May 13th, 1992 — exactly seven years to the day after she walked out of the fire.

John Africa, born Vincent Leaphart, the Korean War veteran who founded MOVE, died inside the house. He was 54 years old.

Mike Africa Jr. was born in a Philadelphia jail in 1978 to two MOVE Nine parents serving sentences for the death of Officer Ramp. He grew up visiting his mother and father in separate state prisons. In the years since both parents were paroled in 2018, he has become the public voice of MOVE. In 2023, he bought the rowhouse lot at 6221 Osage Avenue — the same lot where the FBI’s pre-positioned C4 killed his five young cousins. He is raising the money to build a memorial on it.

The FBI has never identified the agent or agents who handled the chain of custody for the six pounds of missing C4. The October 22nd, 1985 letter from Wayne G. Davis remains the only FBI document acknowledging the January transfer. The bones are still being recovered. The agent who supplied the bomb has never been named on a public FBI record. MOVE is still there.