‘Putting more salt in wounds’
Shocked that mom was elder abuse homicide victim
More than a year after her four sons buried Patricia Crosson, the family is reeling again after learning the longtime Radio City Music Hall worker’s death was actually a homicide.
The long-delayed results of a city Medical Examiner’s probe into her April 30, 2019 death found Crosson was a victim of unspecified “elder abuse” when she was found unconscious inside her East Harlem apartment. She passed away at Mount Sinai Morningside on May 13 — a day after Mother’s Day, relatives said.
“I was already hurting, and this is just putting more salt in the wounds,” said her shocked son Vandell Crosson, 37. “I need answers … Now I have a lot more to figure out. What the hell is going on? Because somebody is going to be charged with murder, and I don’t understand how or why.”
The July 16 homicide ruling was based on an autopsy, but the sons received no details on their diminutive 64year-old mother’s demise.
“I haven’t heard anything from the police department, from the medical examiner,” said Crosson. “I don’t even know what that means. What the f—- is elder abuse?”
The homicide finding sent investigators back to the case, trying to determine if criminal charges are warranted in the death. An email to the city Medical Examiner’s office seeking details was not immediately returned.
Patricia Crosson was the mother of five boys, with one of her kids dying at the age of 2, and she raised the children by herself.
“She was the most loving woman you’d ever meet,” said Vandell Crosson. “She’d take the shirt off her back. She made sure we had food on the table, went to bed at a certain time, went to school. She made sure dinner was on the table. Our daddy wasn’t there.”
Medics arrived 15 months ago at her sixth-floor East Harlem apartment in the Robert F. Wagner Houses after one of her sons called to report his mom was unconscious and having difficulty breathing. Less than two weeks later, she was dead.
Crosson, who lives in North Carolina, never made it north to say goodbye.
“That’s what kills me to this day, that I waited too long,” he said. When the family matriarch passed away, she was living with two of Vandell’s siblings — including one afflicted with cerebral palsy.
Patricia Crosson was twice hospitalized with pneumonia before her death, losing a leg to gangrene during one of her earlier stays, Vandell recalled.
In April 2019, he received a call from his brother: Their mother was going back to the hospital. She never made it home again.
Crosson remembers speaking to his mother just before that final hospitalization. He promised to bring her down to North Carolina, but he didn’t have enough time to make good on his word.
Vandell couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to hurt his mother, a tiny dynamo who always provided for her children.
“She had a little mean streak, with her 4-foot-5 self,” he recalled. “But she loved everything. She would do anything for anybody.”