A 24-year-old pregnant widow will give birth next week without her husband after a Brooklyn building collapse killed him and seven others — a preventable tragedy built on 98 ignored housing code violations and a developer's record of cutting corners.

Jose Luis Caguana Cosquillo, 26, was working near the three-story building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue when it collapsed into an adjacent excavation site Wednesday. His wife, Nataly Magaly Llumitasig, learned he was dead from a coworker's phone call. "I went straight to the hospital. He had already passed away," she told the New York Post. "I saw him. I was crying. I touched his face. I told him, 'I love you, I'm going to miss you a lot.'" She still hasn't told their 4-year-old son, Nathan, that his father is dead.

Cosquillo was over the moon about the baby. "He was so excited about the baby. He would say, 'Oh my God, my baby is coming,'" Llumitasig said. Now that child will be born into a household gutted by government negligence.

The building's owner, Olufemi Falade, had racked up 98 open housing code violations — unsafe electrical wiring, inadequate sprinkler water supply, no smoke detectors, water outages, and bed bug infestations, according to city data cited by Gothamist. Ninety-eight violations. The city knew. The city documented it. The city did nothing that stopped a building from falling into a hole.

The developer of the adjacent property at 2625 Bedford Avenue, where the excavation site sat, had its own record of cutting corners and ignoring city orders, Gothamist reported. City inspectors apparently failed there, too.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised accountability at a Thursday press conference: "If there is anyone or any entity operating in this city that bears responsibility for what happened, we will hold them fully accountable." His office deflected when asked about residents' concerns over construction saturation. The city is now examining 100 other sites tied to the construction companies involved — locking the barn after the horse is dead.

Gothamist framed the collapse as a story about "the pace of development and gentrification" in Flatbush, quoting residents who tied the disaster to rezoning and displacement. The Post led with the widow's grief. Neither framed it as what it is: a failure of government to enforce its own safety laws before people died.

Both former Mayor Adams and current Mayor Mamdani have pushed fast-track development — Adams through his "City of Yes" plan, Mamdani to address low vacancy rates. Urban planner George Janes admitted to Gothamist that fast-tracking a complex system carries "unintended consequences." Eight dead is not an unintended consequence. It is a predictable outcome of a system that issues violations and doesn't enforce them, that greenlights excavation next to occupied buildings, and that treats housing code enforcement as paperwork rather than life safety.

The agencies that failed are the Department of Buildings, which issued the violations and apparently let them sit open, and whatever city office allowed deep excavation to proceed next to a structurally compromised building. Named officials — Mamdani, Adams — bear political responsibility for prioritizing development speed over enforcement.

"Right now my heart is broken," Llumitasig said. She will raise two children alone because the system that was supposed to protect her family treated 98 violations as a filing cabinet problem, not a matter of life and death.

The question that matters: why does it take eight bodies for the city to inspect 100 construction sites?