For victim’s kin, the sorrow endures
basement, where he drowned in floodwaters.Sikowitz and Streich, who have become close friends since the tragedy, said the lost lives don’t get enough attention. The news coverage and press conferences focus on the billions of dollars needed to repair or replace homes that were badly damaged or swept away during Sandy. The human toll is rarely mentioned, they said.
“You can rebuild those things, even if it takes longer than five years,” Streich said. “You never get back the lives that are lost. And there is no value that you can put on that.”
Families of victims are still overwhelmed by grief.
“Every time I have time by myself, I sit and cry,” said Elsa St. John, 59, of Manhattan. “My mother was the most important thing for me.”
Herminia St. John died on the night of Sandy. A Panamanian immigrant, she was 75 and had 14 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. She and her daughter shared an apartment on the 22nd floor of a high-rise in the Phipps Houses in the East Village.
When the electricity went out during the storm, their night descended into chaos. The oxygen tank Herminia needed to breathe malfunctioned, and her daughter was unable to reach an operator when she called 911.
In desperation, Herminia’s grandson ran to get help, but it took 45 minutes for an ambulance to come. When paramedics arrived, Herminia was already dead.
Elsa hugged and kissed her mother in her final moments. She listened as she took her last breaths.
“Those three little breaths, I remember every year,” Elsa said.
Jake Vogelman and Jessie Streich-Kest had been friends since the seventh grade.
Sikowitz described her son — a Brooklyn College graduate student who loved theater production and studied technical lighting and set design — as an “old soul.”
After Sandy, people she had never met would come up to her to recall a kind act her son had done.
“A lot of his good deeds, I didn’t find out about until he died,” said Sikowitz, a housing court judge who lives in Park Slope. “He was really a kind, nonjudgmental person where he accepted people for who they were.”
Streich’s home in Ditmas Park is a shrine to her daughter’s creativity and the effect she had on others. The walls are filled with Jessie’s paintings and art projects.
Jessie graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and then earned a master’s degree in special education from Hunter College.
Her mom said she overcame an anxiety disorder and immersed herself in causes she believed in. She volunteered on the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and she spent summers working for the advocacy group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
“She was an amazing organizer, actually, but she really loved to teach,” Streich said.
Jessie had started her “dream job” as a teacher at the Bushwick School for Social Justice in Brooklyn 2½ months before she died.
“She was incredible with kids. Kids just loved her,” Streich said.
After her death, Jessie’s students wrote letters to Streich to tell her how much she had inspired them.
Streich suffered another deep loss just five weeks after losing her daughter when her husband, Jon Kest, a beloved community advocate, died of cancer. She still lives in the home where she and her husband raised their two children. Her son lives with his friends in a rental unit above her home.
Max, Jessie’s now 7-year-old dog, survived the storm despite suffering a skull injury. The pit bull-shepherd mix that Jessie adopted from a rescue shelter in the Bronx lives with Streich.
Streich and Sikowitz didn’t know each other before the tragedy. Their friendship blossomed when Streich found an item of Jake’s and called Sikowitz.
“We just connected,” Streich said. “We would text each other all the time about how s----y we were feeling.”
Now they see each other at least once a month and attend a bereavement group together.
“You spend your whole life doing everything you can to protect your child,” Sikowitz said. “When my child needed me, I wasn’t there to protect him. I think we both struggle with that feeling knowing that we couldn’t protect them.”