Skyline Plaza Collapse: 14 Killed, No One Went to Prison

In 1973 a tower at Bailey's Crossroads fell floor by floor after its shoring came out too early. Jurors agreed on the cause, not who gave the order.

Show Notes

On March 2, 1973, the top of an apartment tower under construction at Bailey's Crossroads came down floor by floor. Fourteen men were killed. Workers had watched the floors sag for minutes before it fell, and no one went to prison.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2026/08/16/skyline-plaza-collapse-baileys-crossroads-1973/

Contains period descriptions of death and injury.

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

On the afternoon of March second, nineteen seventy-three, a young man named Robert Taylor was running the outside elevator on an apartment tower going up at Bailey's Crossroads, in Fairfax County. A supervisor came to him. Taylor later told the Washington Post what the man said. Stop! Stop! You've got to take me up! It's an emergency! Taylor looked up and couldn't see anything wrong. In his words, it was a clear, peaceful March day. About two minutes later, the top of the building came down, floor by floor, all the way to the ground. Fourteen men were killed. So what happened on that tower that afternoon? And why did no one go to prison for it? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. This one is about fourteen men who went to work on a construction site and didn't come home, so it's a quieter episode than most. It's built on nineteen sources, from the Washington Post's front page the next morning to photographs of the rebuilt tower taken in twenty twenty-six. Each one is listed on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

The tower was called Skyline Plaza. It was part of Skyline Center, a two hundred million dollar complex going up along Route seven, on land that had been a small airport. Twenty-six stories of condominiums, due to open that August. The sales firm said the building had sold out in ten days, to more than four hundred buyers. Some of them had already sold their homes to move in. The concrete work belonged to a subcontractor, Miller and Long. And a tower like this goes up one floor at a time. Crews pour each concrete floor onto wooden forms, held up by posts called shoring. The shoring stays until the concrete is strong enough to carry itself. The engineer's drawings called for two full floors of shoring under every new slab, and another floor of props below that. On March second, the crews were finishing a fresh pour on the twenty-fourth floor. The floor right under it, the twenty-third, was four days old.

Federal investigators later concluded that shoring had been pulled out from under the newest floors before the concrete was strong enough. They estimated the twenty-third floor that day at about twelve hundred pounds per square inch. It was designed for three thousand. And there was time to see it coming. According to the federal report, most eyewitnesses described the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors sagging, from six inches to two feet, over fifteen or twenty minutes. One worker, Alfred Cole, said a supervisor sent him down for a jack, to prop up the sagging concrete. He was on his way when the concrete around him began to crack. Two minutes before the collapse, a supervisor had Robert Taylor take him up, and got off at the fourteenth floor. Taylor took what he called a very long minute to get the cage back down. As he put it, I heard the thing crack at the top. Everybody kept telling me, Get out! The building's going down! Then the twenty-third floor punched through around its columns. The floors above came down onto it, and it kept going, floor by floor, to the ground. The Post said it took about twenty seconds. In the basement, Larry Rivers had been stripping planking from the concrete forms. He told the Post what he saw. I ran for my life. I looked back and saw four of my buddies being crushed by the concrete. It was sickening. Another man, up on the twenty-third floor, saw the ceiling cracking and ran for the stairs. At the fourth floor, he jumped out a window. He broke both arms. Fourteen men died, ten in the tower and four in the parking garage beside it, where the collapse spread. Thirty-four were injured.

In April of nineteen seventy-three, a Fairfax County grand jury indicted one man for involuntary manslaughter. Roger Arnold was thirty, the senior Miller and Long official on the job. He was charged in three of the deaths, of the men whose bodies were the first recovered from the rubble. Their names were Danny Ray White, Clemons Riley Holcomb and Daniel Wilhite. A judge ruled that Arnold couldn't get a fair trial in Fairfax after so much publicity, so the case was moved three hundred miles away, to the coal town of Clintwood. That September, the head of quality control at the concrete supplier testified that he'd often asked Arnold what the big hurry was. Roger's reply would be that he was trying to make a name for himself. The jury deadlocked, nine to three for acquittal. The judge then struck the prosecution's evidence and acquitted Arnold, saying the experts disagreed on the cause. One juror explained it afterward. All twelve agreed the shoring had come out too early. The main question we wanted to resolve was who gave the order to remove those shores, and none of the witnesses convinced us that Roger Arnold did it.

The other cases ended small. Miller and Long was fined three hundred dollars for failing to use adequate shoring. A judge ruled the developer couldn't be held criminally responsible for its subcontractor. At that trial, a county building inspector described how the system worked. Under a little-used county law, the contractors at the site had been allowed to decide for themselves when the shoring could come out. That November, Miller and Long agreed to pay thirteen thousand dollars to settle federal safety citations, without admitting the violations. Workers had few ways to sue. A federal judge dismissed a half-million-dollar suit against four firms on the job, because Virginia's workmen's compensation law protected them. Fourteen men died at Bailey's Crossroads. No one went to prison.

In July of nineteen seventy-four, the Post reported that approval had been given to rebuild. The tower stands on South George Mason Drive, and people live in it. The collapse became a teaching case. A concrete industry guide to formwork has called it a tragic example of too-early shore removal. And Fairfax County became one of the first places in the country to adopt a formal inspection program for critical structures.

That's the story of the Skyline Plaza collapse. Every source for this story, and the names we know, are on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org. We do this to bring back the lost and untold stories of Washington. This has been Ghosts of DC.