First, they lost their home in a fire ...
Then, 2 days later, family loses last belongings in car burglary
SAN JOSE » The Muniz family figured bad luck and loss were behind them. The couple and their two daughters barely escaped their burning home last week that claimed their cat Munchkin and nearly all their possessions. Two years before that, their cottage and car were inundated by the San Jose flood of 2017.
But there was one more insult to bear. It happened Saturday morning, after Daniel Muniz and Frankie Gomez and their two daughters regrouped from the fire at a hotel overnight. Thieves broke into their car parked in an underground parking garage downtown and stole their very last belongings, including the girls’ asthma medicine and Daniel’s lucky sneakers, the ones wrapped in tape at the toes.
“It’s like, OK, flood, fire, we’re already down. It’s kind of like, why is this happening to us again?” said Gomez, the girls’ mother. “We need to catch a break somewhere.”
Just days before Christmas, the family hasn’t even talked about their plans for the holiday that went up in flames when the living room of their rental home on 19th Street caught fire along with their decorated tree early Thursday morning. The cause has yet to be determined.
“I just don’t even know what else can get worse for us,” said 14-year-old Lyric Gomez-Muniz, a student at Lincoln High School.
Just three weeks earlier, Muniz — a seasonal worker at UPS who also works odd jobs in the food business — was counting his blessings. It was raining outside when he posted this message to his Facebook friends:
“The fridge is full of food. Our daughters are Healthy, working 2 jobs, I haven’t had a sip in I don’t know how long, not counting. I’m drinkin coffee with my girls sleeping on the couch next
to me. Life’s Good.”
They had just moved in with his mother on 19th Street after they could no longer afford the rising rent on their apartment. Frankie has a good job as a receptionist at Kaiser, but her income was barely enough to afford market rate rent. The move seemed like a perfect solution: Daniel’s mother had health problems and welcomed the care of family.
The Munizes didn’t have much, especially after the flood, but what they had was meaningful: photos of family, soccer jerseys and cleats for the girls, paintings from relatives and, of course, the black Converse sneakers that Muniz wore on every successful job interview. He had even written his daughters names, Lyric and Berlin, on each one.
Berlin, 11, was up early Thursday morning, getting ready for school at 6:30 when she first smelled the smoke. She ignored it until a dark black cloud started seeping through the crack in her bedroom door. She woke her sister first.
“I told her to get out of the house and sprint to the back door,” Berlin said, “and don’t grab anything.”
In the hallway, she watched in horror as the flames engulfed the living room. She raced to her parents’ room down the hall.
“The house is on fire! It’s on fire!” she yelled, waking them up.
Within moments, everyone was safe outside. But Daniel ran back in, looking for Munchkin, their beloved cat. It was dark and black inside, and Munchkin didn’t emerge. The windows started to burst, and he rushed outside again.
“There was no way to stop it,” he said. “I was still trying to get a hose with my next-door neighbor. The tiny hose would not do anything. That fire, it was fierce.”
In the days after the fire, friends and family — and scores of strangers — came to their aid. The girls’ soccer coach collected $200. San Jose firefighters promised them new bikes. Clothes came wrapped in a bow. A GoFundMe page was set up.
On Friday night, with vouchers from the Red Cross, they parked the car in the convention center parking lot and gathered all they could carry of their replacement clothes and headed to their room. They couldn’t take everything, and Muniz overlooked the envelope containing the $200 and the bag holding his old sneakers.
As they crossed the parking lot the next morning, they spotted the Christmas bow on the ground first. It
looked familiar. Then they saw the shattered glass and broken window.
“I thought, ‘Oh my Lord,’ ” Daniel Muniz said. “I almost laughed. This is ridiculous. We had already lost the house.”
He cleaned up the glass
so the girls could sit safely in the back seat, and they all headed to get it repaired before another storm was set to blow in.
Daniel and Frankie, who both grew up in San Jose and have been together 26 years, are trying to stay
positive for their daughters.
“My blessings are all with me right now,” Frankie said. “There’s four of us, and that’s the most important.”