“As fate would have it, a truss at the top of the building failed. Part of the façade fell down as they were sitting outside enjoying the warm weather,” Chicago Mayor Lightfoot said.
and seriously injured two others on a "family home" that a brother and sister could not afford to maintain.
"Yesterday, there was a building collapse on the West Side in Ald. Jason Ervin’s ward. What we learned is that a sister and a brother who were living in the family home had fallen on hard times and were not able to keep up the upkeep of their property," the mayor said. Anthony Wright, 53, was pulled from under the stone debris and pronounced dead, fire officials and the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. His sister was examined at the scene but was not hospitalized.
"As building inspectors have gone through it, they’ve determined that the supports that are necessary — the bones, as folks in the building trades would call it — have just deteriorated to the point of probably not being able to be salvaged," she said.