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Report: Series Of Lapses Preceded Deadly Upper West Side Facade Collapse

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- A series of regulatory lapses spanning years, and an engineer's faked inspection report, preceded a facade collapse in New York City that killed a 2-year-old girl earlier this year, according to an official report released Tuesday.

Company officials at The Esplanade, a senior living facility on the Upper West Side, failed to file a required facade inspection report from 2005 to 2007 and hired a subcontractor whose engineer certified the building's safety in 2011 without actually inspecting it, the Department of Investigation probe found.

"He basically filed a form that said that he had inspected this building and found it safe. In fact, he had not actually gone out and done the inspection at all," DOI Commissioner Mark G. Peters told 1010 WINS.

The engineer, 55-year-old Maqsood Faruqi, of Jackson, New Jersey, was arrested Tuesday morning on a charge of offering a false instrument for filing. He pleaded not guilty.

Faruqi's attorney, Joseph lo Piccolo, called the toddler's death tragic, but said Faruqi followed city rules as required.

"We believe that no violation of any criminal law or penal law code or city code was violated," lo Piccolo said. "We expect a full defense of these charges."

Peters said in a statement the case "represents massive breakdowns in basic public safety rules."

"We had multiple opportunities to prevent it," Peters said. "And there were multiple failures in the system here."

Greta Greene was with her grandmother when she was hit by a piece of terracotta that fell eight stories this past May. She died the following day at a hospital.

Greta Greene
Greta Greene (credit: Image via Facebook)

Department of Buildings officials had fined The Esplanade for failing to secure the building's facade but didn't send out inspectors, even after a private consultant noticed alarming cracks and notified top buildings officials two months before Greene's death, the report found.

"I would get someone over pretty quick on this,'' the consultant emailed a top buildings official, according to the report.

A local law established after a similar deadly accident in 1979 requires owners of buildings six stories or taller to file facade safety inspection reports every five years with the Department of Buildings. Officials there receive about 27,000 of them each reporting cycle, according to the report.

Investigators examining such reports found that 2,490 buildings, many of them city-owned, filed such reports in February that concluded the facades were unsafe, the report found. Four months later, fewer than half had filed reports noting the unsafe conditions had been fixed, it found.

"The whole purpose for doing these inspections is to try to prevent these tragedies," Peters said.

The Department of Buildings has taken the DOI recommendations to improve their compliance protocol. Now, if a building owner fails to file a timely inspection, the city will inspect the building after 180 days and charge the landlord, CBS2's Hazel Sanchez reported.

A spokesman for The Esplanade didn't immediately return messages seeking comment.

(TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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