Immigrant community becomes epicenter of grief after deadly Brooklyn building collapse

Leonor Yupa dropped to her knees Thursday when a Spanish-language media reporter said her 22-year-old son was among eight people whose lives were claimed by the Brooklyn building collapse the day before.

“I want my son! I want my son!” the Ecuadorian mother cried in Spanish as family members tried to hold Yupa up and others who gathered at Bethesda Church of God in Christ assured her the reports were unconfirmed.

The agonizing cries of another woman who just lost her husband reverberated through the Brooklyn sanctuary across the street from the collapse. When the woman learned her husband’s body was pulled from the debris Thursday morning, she collapsed and wailed her husband’s name.

Family members gathered around the widow and formed a prayer circle.

Just outside the church, a nervous father also prayed. He was anxiously waiting to learn the fate of his son, a construction worker who has not been reachable since the collapse.

In the Flatbush neighborhood – home to a mix of immigrant communities – six adults and two children had died and over a dozen were injured after the three-story mixed-use building collapsed on Veterans Day, a day on which many families stayed home.

“I want to take a moment to remember those we have so senselessly lost,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters Thursday. “These were our friends and our neighbors, parents and children, young families building their lives in our city, and immigrants from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Trinidad, and beyond.”

The day after the tragedy, residents and other bystanders crowded the sidewalk as construction equipment was used to remove debris and rubble from the site. Clothes still hung from a closet in an adjoining building where a wall came down during the collapse.

Heavy rain pelted the intersection of Flatbush and Bedford avenues, a multicultural enclave that is the heart of New York City’s Caribbean diaspora. The names on signs of storefront churches and businesses – from bakeries, restaurants and beauty salons – reflect places like Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and more recently, newcomers from Mexico and Ecuador.

Among those killed Wednesday were three Colombian citizens, two Ecuadorian men, two Guinean men and a 26-year-old Guatemalan man, officials from the countries announced.

In the aftermath of the collapse, local families, clergy and community groups gathered to support one another while demanding accountability for housing conditions and construction oversight in their predominantly Black and immigrant neighborhood.

On Wednesday night, Yupa and other relatives spent hours scouring hospitals throughout Brooklyn hoping to find her son, Gabriel Siguencia.

The family then visited the collapse site Thursday. Yupa shielded herself from heavy rain under the canopy of the church as a woman with a West Indian lilt alerted other bystanders nearby that she saw first responders pull a young child and a woman from the rubble.

Then came the news about Siguencia, who had arrived in New York from Ecuador only about a month ago and started working as a carpenter at the construction site adjacent to the building collapse about two weeks ago, according to uncles, cousins and family friends.

“He came to America looking for the same opportunities that people from all over the world come here for,” said family friend Javier Ortega, who drove Siguencia’s mother to the site from her home in Connecticut. “That’s why he was working there.”

Like many other families, Siguencia’s loved ones awaited news about him across the street from the collapse site.

As the downpour intensified Thursday over the neighborhood known as “Little Haiti,” a member of Bethesda Church of God in Christ invited Siguencia’s family inside the warm vestibule.

Yupa, weeping, sat on a folding chair as a Haitian church member served her cups of water. As Yupa sobbed, family members surrounded her and Ecuadoran consular officials made calls trying to track down information.

Soft murmurs of “Hallelujah, hallelujah” spilled out from the church filled with Haitian worshippers on the other side of the vestibule doors.

“We all have to look out for each other in this country,” said the woman who brought water to Yupa and the others. “It doesn’t matter where you come from.”

Another woman implored Yupa as she wept: “Go in the church and pray, please.”

Time ticked by with a heaviness before officials with the Ecuadoran consul walked Yupa and her friends and family members several blocks in the heavy rain to a nearby YMCA, where relatives of the dead and missing had been gathering.

The consul general of Ecuador, Gicela Andrade Valens, later told reporters outside that authorities had confirmed Siguencia’s death to his mother. Another Ecuadorian national, 26-year-old José Luis Caguana Cosquillo, was also killed.

Cosquillo left behind a pregnant wife who is due to give birth soon, said Winston Sanchez, who spoke on behalf of Cosquillo’s family.

Sanchez said he hopes the city will do more to protect construction workers.

“Developers, real estate, different construction companies, they’re making a lot of money with the blood of many construction workers,” Sanchez said. “That is unacceptable, and I hope the city, on behalf of the families, will do more to protect our construction workers.”

Colombia’s consulate in New York said two Colombian children and one adult were killed in the collapse.

“The Consulate of Colombia in New York reiterates its most sincere condolences to the victims’ families and loved ones,” the consulate said.

The Guinean Community of America said a memorial for two victims, Mamadou Bhoye Barry and Mamadou Bhoye Diaye, will take place on Sunday evening at a nearby mosque.

Some, like the husband of a six-month pregnant woman rescued from the rubble, rejoiced as they received word their loved one was safe.

The woman is hospitalized for serious injuries, but her unborn child is still alive “by the grace of God,” according to a spokesperson for her family.

The woman’s husband said he was returning home from getting groceries when he saw a crowd gathered, thinking there had been a car crash.

“When she told me that, I couldn’t feel where I was anymore. I realized that our building borders this area. I told her, ‘My wife is inside, my friends are inside!’” Bah recalled.

Another woman who survived the collapse, Ciahola Lawrence, said she had taken the day off from work and had been trying to go to sleep with the lights off in her room because she had a headache.

Lawrence then heard a loud thump. When she opened her eyes, she could see light everywhere and an open view of the rubble.

“I could see my neighbors coming out on stretchers – they were already dead. We didn’t deserve this!” Lawrence wailed, later pushing her head into her husband’s chest as her words dissolved into sobs.

A construction worker who sprinted away as the building collapsed, Miguel Tigselema, said he and other workers helped evacuate victims trapped in the rubble and formed a line from the site of the collapse, passing victims from person to person, he recounted.

“Family, there was a huge accident here at work, thank God, this child came out of there,” Tigselema said in Spanish after climbing out of the debris with a boy, according to a video he recorded.

Tigselema says he tried to calm the boy down as he cried out for his mother.

“I stayed holding him and started to cry. I thought of my son, who was almost the same age as him,” he said.

Tigselema handed the child off to firefighters. He later learned some of his co-workers were dead or injured.

“It’s sad because sometimes at work you find your best friends, your best brothers. It’s like our second home,” he said.

Pastor Alfred Justin Joseph’s church, the Bethesda Church of God in Christ, became an open sanctuary for the injured, the anxious and the grieving.

“They were standing in the street. I let them in,” Joseph said. “Thank God we have counselors in the church — people who do counseling for grief.”

Various groups have streamed through his church, including a dozen people in the first wave. While some have since been escorted to a local YMCA or hotels, the church remains an epicenter of consolation and support.

As she heard the wailing of the young woman who lost her spouse in the collapse, Flatbush resident Joy Kerr led a prayer circle to offer some comfort in a moment of devastation.

Kerr walked into the church and found the young woman crying hysterically after learning her spouse, a construction worker, was killed when the building came down.

Kerr listened to the woman sobbing for about half an hour and said, “No, I can’t take this. I can’t sit back and just watch her and listen to her cry so hysterically.”

She gathered with the woman who had lost her spouse and those around them, and they began to pray.

“This is devastating,” Kerr said. “Nothing like this has ever happened in this neighborhood, and we just need to come together and stay together as a community.”