The slinger on a crane lift that caused the death of a young mother walking past a Higgins Homes site has denied lying about the incident to cover his own errors.
Christian Okonkwo, the first worker called as a witness by the prosecution in the case, was guiding a pallet of bricks into a third-floor loading bay of the residential site in Bow, east London, on 27 March 2018.
At the Old Bailey on Wednesday (14 October), the self-employed slinger, who was working for subcontractor DWG Brickwork, described seeing the load come into view too close to a scaffolding pole sticking out of the top of the building and telling the crane driver on a radio to stop and hoist the load up.
After that he saw the pallet make contact with a tube, the protective netting split and the bricks fall to the floor below, he said.
Michaela Boor, 28, who was walking past the site on Burdett Road, was injured and died two days later, the day after her 29th birthday.
Okonkwo’s account was challenged under cross-examination on Thursday (15 October).
Kerim Fuad KC, defending Dawood Maan, the job’s crane supervisor and a self-employed contractor working for Coulson Lifting Services, queried whether the pallet could have struck the pole without leaving any signs of damage.
“If a one-tonne pallet of bricks had hit a vertical scaffold tube, surely that would have broken or damaged the pole?” he said.
Okonkwo, who is not on trial, replied: “When I immediately shouted stop, the load touched the scaffold tube and lost balance. It’s not like it smashed down. It came down and sat on the tube and lost balance.”
Dominic Kay KC, defending crane operator Alexander McInnes, a self-employed worker for London Tower Cranes, showed the court an investigator’s picture of a brick fork taken after the incident.
The brick fork was attached to the pallet by Okonkwo, with help from Maan, to help secure the load before it was lifted by the crane.
Kay said the picture showed the tines of the fork had not been spaced out properly, which he said was Okonkwo’s responsibility.
He also accused the slinger of changing his description of the incident in different statements given to investigators, saying he variously saw the load “bounce”, “bounced down and sat on the tube” and “snag”.
Kay added that in one statement Okonkwo described telling McInnes to stop in “a normal voice” and in another he said he had shouted.
In court Okonkwo denied telling McInnes over the radio, “Alex, I think you just killed someone”, until Kay read a police statement in which Okonkwo said he had done that.
Okonkwo said some of his memories had faded.
“What I’m suggesting to you is having told him from the loading bay that he had killed someone, when he asked you what happened you said to him, ‘you drove the load into the scaffolding’. You said that to him because that’s what you wanted him and everybody else to think had occurred,” Kay said.
Okonkwo said he had described what happened.
Kay said Okonkwo had been distracted until seeing the load too late and panicking.
“You panicked and you shouted ‘stop’ and because the load wasn’t positioned on the forks, by you, it wasn’t centred, by you, the load was unstable.
“You knew that you were responsible for the forks […] You knew that you were responsible for the banking of the load. You knew that the best thing for you was to say ‘you [McInnes] drove it into the scaffolding, you killed someone’.”
The trial continues.
