No word on criminal charges 19 months after deadly collapse of 324 Main St. apartments
By TOM LOEWY and SARAH WATSON – Quad City Times, Davenport, Iowa (TNS)
It’s been 19 months, or 581 days, since the west wall of the six-story apartment building at 324 Main St. in Davenport crumbled to the ground.
The day was May 28, 2023.
Roughly 13,944 hours have passed since the day a disaster took three lives, one woman’s limb, and left an estimated 54 people without a home or any of their belongings.
Dayna Feuerbach spent a second Christmas haunted by the collapse and one nagging question:
“How long does it take before someone is held accountable?”
Feuerbach was living in the building commonly known as “The Davenport” and was in her apartment when it collapsed. She was one of the first survivors to speak to the media in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, but then chose to remain silent as her attorneys filed a civil lawsuit against building owner Andrew Wold.
The multi-count complaint also names Davenport Hotel LLC, Andrew Wold Investments LLC, Select Structural Engineering, LLC, Bi-State Masonry, Inc., the city of Davenport, Waukee Investments I LLC, and Parkwild Properties LC as defendants in the suit.
She is represented by attorney Jeffrey Goodman of the Philadelphia-based firm of Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky, as well as Christopher D. Stombaugh of Platteville, Wisconsin,-based firm DiCello Levitt.
In an interview conducted on Messenger, Feuerbach spoke publicly for the first time since early June of 2023.
She said she wants to know how long she and every other resident of 324 Main St. “will have to wait for justice.”
‘I thought it was my time to die’
Feuerbach spent 20 years of her life in The Davenport, and everything she kept there is gone. She said she was lucky to have kept her bank cards, identification and phone, but others weren’t able to take anything with them during the mad dash to safety.
“I lived on the fifth floor of The Davenport … I was one apartment away from where the structure ripped,” she said. “I almost fell out a stairwell window because of the shaking and chaos. I thought it was my time to die.”
Like a lot of the people displaced by the collapse, Feuerbach spent a long time in an extended-stay hotel. There were times when she slept in her car.
She struggled with remembering the sounds of the collapse and “people screaming.”
Feuerbach said she knows she is not alone. She worries about the other people who were there that day.
“We all lost everything. Three dead. A girl had her leg amputated. How long does it take before someone is held accountable?” she asked. “If one of your loved ones lived in that building, wouldn’t you want the truth to come out?”
Three men, Branden Colvin, Ryan Hitchcock and Daniel Prien, were killed in the collapse, and one woman, Quanishia “Peach” Berry, was rescued from the rubble after an on-site leg amputation.
An unseen report
Almost a year after the collapse of The Davenport, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation submitted its report to the Scott County Attorney’s Office, according to the officials involved.
The Division of Criminal Investigation started its investigation within days of the collapse on May 28, 2023.
That report has not been released to the public.
After the DCI finished its report, it was given to Scott County Attorney Kelly Cunningham and her office to decide whether to bring criminal charges against anyone involved.
Back in May, the Quad-City Times reached Cunningham by phone. At that time she said her office was in the midst of a flurry of trials and work on other serious cases and would do a complete review of the report once those conclude.
Recent emails to Cunningham seeking the status of the DCI’s report and the possibility of any criminal charges have not been answered.
Asked why the completion of the report took almost a year, Agent Ryan Kedley said the length of time boiled down to several factors, including the complexity of the case.
“First, yes, this is a complex sort of case that we, as investigators for the DCI’s Major Crime Unit, do not typically see, as opposed to investigations involving, say, gunshot deaths, kidnappings, child sexual exploitation, etc. — where a level of criminal intent is often very apparent,” Kedley wrote in an email. “And, from an investigative standpoint, our primary objective in this case has been to investigate whether criminal law was violated through the various circumstances leading up to building collapse. … There were numerous circumstances to address. Looking into, documenting properly, and reporting on these various circumstances has been a lengthy process.”
The report won’t include any sort of legal opinions or charging recommendations or suggestions, Kedley said. Throughout the investigation “we’ve been in regular communication with Ms. Cunningham, during which she has assessed where things stood from a legal standpoint — criminal vs. civil, etc. — and provided feedback to investigators,” he wrote.
Cunningham, speaking generally after receiving the report because she hadn’t completed her review, said tragedies and loss of life happen, but that doesn’t always mean there was criminal intent to prosecute under criminal law. Some may belong in civil court.
“We’re talking about the collapse of a physical structure,” Cunningham said.
In May she said she must go through the report and give it a thoughtful review, which couldn’t be addressed immediately.
There was one after-collapse document that was made public.
A report from forensic engineers hired by the city of Davenport found “root causes” of the collapse: the removal of layers of brick in the days before the collapse without adequate shoring in place.
Silence before, silence after
Feuerbach said she knew of work on the building and the presence of city inspectors in the building.
“There had been work on the back wall for years,” she said. “There were many inspections and walk-throughs by the city. We were never, ever, ever warned of any potential danger. Not once.”
The silence continued, Feuerbach said. After the collapse, she said she never spoke with any city officials, investigators, or the county attorney’s office.
Feuerbach said her pursuit through civil court is almost as slow and equally silent.
“It’s hard to know what’s going on,” she said. “It’s time for people to start telling the truth about what happened.”
Feuerbach is seeking a judgment from the court “in an amount that will fairly and adequately compensate her for the damages … as well as punitive damages,” according to the court filing.
The court filing claimed Feuerbach suffered injuries to her physical, psychological and emotional well-being, including head trauma, and are said to be “permanent in nature.” She incurred medical expenses and will need to continue seeking medical attention. She experienced a loss of income, future earning capacity, the value of all possessions lost in the collapse and demolition, and “full mind and body.”
In the days after the collapse, Feuerbach said she had no way to know the scope of the loss.
“When it first happened, I don’t know, I didn’t realize the finality of it,” she said. “I guess I thought, well, this is awful, but somehow there’ll be repairs and we’ll go on living back in the building. But then we realized pretty soon that that was it, that the building was going to be coming down, but we’d never get back in again and we’d lose everything, and, boy, that realization was awful.”
Now Feuerbach is afraid the ghosts of the past is all she will have left.
“It’s been (19) months since the collapse on May 28th … It’s like we’ve all been forgotten,” she said.
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