Last August an ironworker at the towering new jail under construction in Downtown Brooklyn claimed that he had been “severely injured” while transporting heavy equipment up a staircase without proper safety equipment, according to a lawsuit he filed.
The city agency overseeing the project, the Department of Design & Construction (DDC), however, was told the incident involved only a “minor injury,” according to internal emails reviewed by The City Reporter.
As a result, Robert Romero’s accident was not reported to the oversight agencies that enforce construction site safety — the city Department of Buildings (DOB) and the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). Both would have to be notified if the injury had been classified as serious.
Romero’s accident was one of several instances where Tutor Perini, the general contractor in charge of building the $2.9 billion Brooklyn Borough-Based Jail, did not report some jobsite incidents as required, an investigation by The City Reporter found.
Worker injuries — including one death on the job — are only the most serious of the safety issues plaguing the Brooklyn jail site, where local residents report a steady rain of dangerous construction debris falling onto their homes and sidewalks as the city races to complete four new local jails before a 2027 deadline to close Rikers Island.
“Somebody is going to get killed,” said Lori Richmond, 49, an illustrator whose building has been struck by sheet metal ducts and plastic buckets plummeting from the future jail. “How many times are they going to get lucky that this did not fall on somebody?”
The buildings department alleges that Tutor failed to notify city officials as required about the debris from the site that had fallen onto the roof and into a patio of Richmond’s building, and failed to report the incident in a logbook contractors must maintain to document activity at job sites.
Then, during the brief storm that swept through Saturday night, a portion of the walkway fence at the site collapsed into the street, landing on top of a motorcyclist. The fire department reports that the rider declined medical treatment. Tutor Perini was issued a violation for failing to safeguard the public and property.
The construction of the new jail is part of the city’s decades-long plan to close Rikers by building four new jails in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and The Bronx. The city awarded Tutor Perini a $2.9 billion contract to construct a new facility at 275 Atlantic Ave., site of the former Brooklyn Detention Complex.
Central to the issue of whether all incidents are being properly reported is the time pressure facing Tutor Perini, which oversees dozens of subcontractors working extended hours to build a 17-story tower that will house just over 1,000 inmates. By law, Rikers is supposed to close by next year, but all four of the new borough-based jail sites that will replace it are way behind schedule.
Brooklyn’s estimated completion date is 2029.
Serious Incidents, Spotty Reporting
The City Reporter’s review of city and court records has found that at least four workers have been involved in serious incidents at the site — including one who died — since demolition of the former detention center began in 2022. In three of those incidents, building inspectors documented unsafe conditions.
Contractors are required to notify federal OSHA regulators directly about “severe incidents” including fatalities and accidents that result in amputations, loss of an eye or in-patient hospitalization. Employers also must notify the city buildings department of any incident that requires off-site medical care, even if the worker isn’t immediately hospitalized but seeks ER treatment later.
Neither OSHA nor DOB was notified of an Aug. 6, 2025 incident revealed in a lawsuit filed against Tutor Perini and the Department of Design and Construction by ironworker Romero alleging he was “severely injured.”
The suit provides few details but claims the accident occurred because Romero was not provided with “a proper and adequate safety device to hoist, move, secure and transport heavy equipment up an elevation (staircase).” Buildings department records reveal that a month earlier, a 311 caller claimed to have seen workers at the site carrying steel up a 6-story staircase without proper safety gear. DOB investigated but issued no violations.
Lisa Pigeon, Romero’s lawyer, did not respond to questions about whether Romero was hospitalized or reported to an ER. But more information emerges in internal emails between city agencies that were generated in response to The City Reporter’s questions about the August incident and other safety violations at the Brooklyn site.
The emails reveal that DDC had prepared “background” information in response to The City Reporter’s questions. In one email, Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesman for the Law Department, advised a DDC representative, “If printed the statements/background will likely trigger discovery requests in the litigation and DDC must be able to substantiate every statement with documents.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s deputy press secretary, Jeremy Edwards, then weighed in, writing, “Defer to DDC. That said I don’t think we need the background here.”
Ultimately DDC did not release the background information they had prepared, but The City Reporter was able to obtain it anyway, and it included DDC’s assertion that the August incident that Romero claimed left him “severely injured” was reported to DDC as a “minor injury.” As a result, DDC did not notify the buildings department or OSHA about it.
On Friday DDC did not respond to questions over whether the agency was informed of the incident immediately after it happened or when the lawsuit was filed months later. Tutor Perini also did not respond to questions about this incident.
Another accident at the jail site was reported to DOB but not to OSHA. On Oct. 23, 2025, a laborer named Sam Wong working for a subcontractor alleged in a lawsuit filed against DDC, the demolition firm Northstar Contracting Group, and others that he was seriously injured in a fall at the site from “a significant height.”
The law firm representing Wong, Bergman Bergman Fields & Lamonsoff, did not respond to The City Reporter’s questions so it’s not known if Wong needed in-patient hospitalization, which would have required OSHA to be notified.
But DDC did notify DOB, and an inspector found “no adequate safety measures were provided at the incident location, which contributed to the fall and created an unsafe work environment,” records say. All work in the area was ordered to stop temporarily.
(Two other accidents involving Northstar were reported to both DOB and OSHA, as required: a laborer who plummeted to his death 18 feet through a hole on the roof and a worker who fell off a scissor lift and was hospitalized. Northstar paid $25,000 in fines issued by DOB and $37,267 to settle OSHA citations related to the fatal accident, records show. Northstar paid another $7,500 in fines to settle DOB’s violations and is contesting $11,000 in OSHA fines related to the scissor lift accident, records show.)
Raining Steel, Buckets and Dust
Over the last few months Tutor Perini representatives have also made misleading statements and tried to dodge responsibility for disruptions to the neighborhood caused by the project, according to documents and interviews.
At a recent community meeting, for instance, a Tutor Perini manager named Saad Naeem said that his firm had not been cited for safety problems before last month.
The records show otherwise. The buildings department has issued a stream of 20 violations against Tutor dating to August 2024. The company has paid $32,500 in fines to date and faces another $45,000 in pending penalties.
The meeting where Naeem made his remarks focused on a disturbing pattern that began months ago of debris falling from the site into the downtown Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill.
Last fall residents began notifying Tutor Perini representatives that they were finding a crushed fireproofing material, known as Monokote, on the sidewalks, along curbs and in their backyards. Then, early this year, a 311 caller reported finding “excessive debris” from the site littering the streets.
The 311 complaint came in on Feb. 19, but a buildings inspector didn’t check it out until weeks later, claiming to have walked the site April 13 and declaring “no excessive debris observed.”
During monthly meetings with the contractor and DDC, neighborhood residents said Tutor Perini at first denied that the debris came from the jail site.
Starting in November, Marci Rosa, 68, who has lived in the neighborhood for nearly three decades, began notifying Tutor Perini and the city about debris piling up outside her home — including dust that coated her food when she tried to eat lunch in her backyard.
“The immediate response was we have no way of knowing that it came from the construction from the jail,” she said, “to which I responded, ‘There’s no other construction going on around my house.’”
In April, she said, Tutor finally admitted it was coming from the jail site.
By then, Rosa’s neighbor, Lori Richmond, was reporting to Tutor Perini and the city about larger items — cardboard boxes, pieces of a welding blanket and a plastic bucket — that fell onto private terraces in her Boerum Place building.
Then, on May 5, what Richmond described as a “rainfall of trash” fell onto the building’s roof and patio. This time the DOB issued a partial stop-work order on the site.
‘Dangerous Stuff’
Valdrin Pustina, 42, the superintendent of the building, said Tutor Perini employees called him multiple times requesting to come and collect the debris from the building’s roof and courtyard, which he refused to allow.
“They were pressuring me to tell them ‘Yes, come and clean up’,’” he said. “I’m sure that their goal was to come clean up and just be like nothing happened.”
After a cleaning crew removed the fallen debris that Tutor Perini wanted to remove itself, Richmond said, “Six hours later, more debris was coming down.”
On May 21 DOB responded to several 311 calls and discovered a new round of debris on Richmond’s roof and patio — an incident Tutor failed to tell them about or record in its logbooks. DOB immediately shut down the site.
“The second round of this dangerous stuff that fell on the roof — the metal pieces, the buckets, everything,” Richmond said.
Richmond worries about her son, who commutes to school on State Street where debris has fallen. And she is concerned for children who will attend the new 3-K site opening on Atlantic Avenue in the fall.
Councilmember Lincoln Restler, D-Brooklyn, said the falling debris “feels like the last straw.”
“This should never happen at any construction site but one that is funded by the city? It’s not appropriate,” he said, noting that the neighborhood supports closing Rikers but “they feel like the city has been a shitty neighbor.”
In response to The City Reporter’s questions about the debris issue, DDC spokesperson Jeffrey Margolies said the agency was in regular communication with the residents of Richmond’s building and that Tutor Perini had installed safety netting on all four sides of the building and a five-foot net on additional floors where concrete flooring is not yet finished.
Margolies noted the buildings department recently paid another visit to the site and issued no more violations.”DDC takes safety concerns very seriously and is working closely with DOB to ensure that any issues arising” from the jail project “are properly addressed,” he said.
Reuven Blau contributed to this story.
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