They lived together and died together
ONE WAS a retired nurse practitioner and the other was an X-ray technician. They lived together, and last Tuesday night they died together when a raging fire engulfed the apartment they occupied on the Grand Concourse in the Mount Eden section of the Bronx, New York.
The mother and daughter were together in their apartment when fire swept the building. They died from smoke inhalation.
Dead are Jamaican Mirabel Bryan, 70, a retired nurse practitioner who worked at Bronx Lebanon Hospital across the street where she lived, and her 42-yearold daughter, Dwanea ‘Renee’ Blake, who worked as an X-ray technician at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. Blake was born in the United States.
Bryan, who hailed from Swallowfield in Kingston, migrated to the United States in the 1970s. She worked as a conductress with the Jamaica Omnibus Service
before migrating.
NO ANSWER
Her son, Lance Fowler, told The Gleaner in a telephone interview that he saw his mother around 3:30 p.m., on the day of the fire, when he took her lunch. Later in the evening, he tried calling her but got no answer.
“I sent my nephew to her apartment and that’s when we found out that there was a fire in the building,” he said. Fowler said that because of the COVID19 crisis, they have been unable to go identify the bodies. He said that as a result, they are unable to make funeral arrangements. They are seeking the help of their councilwoman to get access to identify their loved ones.
He was unable to say if there was a working smoke detector in the apartment.
Fowler, himself a nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital, said the family had just returned from a four-week family cruise on March 8.
“She celebrated her 70th birthday in December and we had a big party for her, where all the family members were,” said Madonna Williams, a niece of Bryan.
Williams said that the hardest part of this ordeal is that they cannot get together as a family.
“We can’t hug each other. No one can come up from Jamaica. This is very sad, but this is the reality of the time,” she said.
Williams said that when she first heard that her aunt had died, she wondered if it was the COVID-19 virus as they had just returned from the cruise.
She was to learn the sad truth that it was a fire instead that claimed their lives.
Blake was a highly thought of technician by her colleagues, who expressed shock and sympathy at her passing.
The New York Daily News quoted some of her fellow co-workers as saying that she was a highly regarded X-ray technician.
They remembered her as the consummate professional and a devoted daughter, according to the Daily News.
Apart from her son Lance and her niece Madonna, Bryan is survived by another daughter, Petarose Tom, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.