A manslaughter trial has opened at the Old Bailey over the Bow building site bricks death of Michaela Boor, a 29-year-old mother who was struck by a pallet of bricks that fell from a tower crane onto a pavement in east London.
Ms Boor was running an ordinary morning errand on 27 March 2018. She and her friend Chelsea Mustafa had dropped their children at a primary school on St Paul’s Way, then walked along Burdett Road to Lidl and Tesco to pick up a few things — it was Ms Boor’s birthday the following day.
The two women were heading back towards the junction with St Paul’s Way when their route took them past a building site where developer Higgins Homes plc was putting up a block of flats. The prosecution says a pallet of bricks being carried by a tower crane towards a loading bay immediately beside the pavement fell onto the women.
Chelsea Mustafa managed to run into the road. Some bricks struck her back and her hand, but she escaped the main force of the load. Michaela Boor did not make it off the pavement. She was hit by the falling bricks, fracturing her skull and suffering catastrophic brain injuries.
She was treated at the scene before being taken to the Royal London Hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery. Her injuries were described as unsurvivable, and she died two days later, on 29 March 2018.
Who is on trial
Higgins Homes plc was the principal contractor and designer for the flats project, the court heard. The company is charged with corporate manslaughter and an offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act. It denies both charges.
Four men are each charged with gross negligence manslaughter and an offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Each denies the charges. They are:
- Thomas Anstis, 69, from Banstead in Surrey — Higgins Homes’ senior site manager and temporary works co-ordinator, responsible for the building site and for overseeing and co-ordinating subcontractors;
- Stephen Coulson, 69, from Hemel Hempstead — director of Coulson Lifting Services, the firm contracted by Higgins Homes, and the appointed person responsible for planning lifting operations, with overall control of them;
- Dawood Maan, 61, from Ashford in Kent — the crane supervisor, working as a self-employed contractor for Coulson Lifting Services;
- Alexander McInnes, 34, from Islington — the crane operator, self-employed and working for London Tower Cranes.
Prosecutor Alexandra Healy KC told the jury that Mr Coulson did not need to remain on site permanently, but had to visit periodically to check whether circumstances had changed and whether the lifting plan needed to be altered. He was not at the site on the day of the incident, the court heard.
Why building sites carry such heavy responsibility
The case will be watched closely across an industry in which heavy loads are lifted within metres of public pavements every day. Under health and safety law, principal contractors owe a duty of care not only to their own workers but to members of the public — and lifting operations must be planned and supervised so that a falling load can never endanger people walking past.
Where organisations are alleged to have fallen short, the consequences can be severe: regulators can and do bring criminal prosecutions against companies and the individuals in charge, as other recent London cases have shown. Transport for London was itself prosecuted over a fatal crash in Walthamstow, while a fatal tower fire highlighted long waits for building safety approvals — a reminder of how high the stakes are when safety systems fail.
What happens next at the trial
The jury is expected to hear from witnesses and experts in crane operations and site management as the prosecution sets out its case in detail, before the defence responds. Manslaughter cases at the Old Bailey often turn on fine questions of personal responsibility, and once both sides have been heard the judge will sum up the evidence before jurors retire to consider their verdicts on each defendant and each charge.
The individual defendants, if convicted of gross negligence manslaughter, would be sentenced by the judge — recent Old Bailey homicide cases have ended in life sentences — while a company convicted of corporate manslaughter faces an unlimited fine.
All five defendants deny the charges against them. Nothing has been proved, and it will be for the jury alone to decide. The trial continues.
For Ms Boor’s family, the proceedings come more than eight years after the March morning she set out to buy a few things for her birthday — and never came home.
