By Colby Carrington
Brandon and Connor Moore, the Staten Island brothers swept out of their mother’s arms as they tried to escape Hurricane Sandy, were buried on Friday.
The young boys – one with curly red hair and the other with brown curls – were laid to rest in the same casket. Parents Damien, a sanitation worker, and Glenda clung to each other as they watched their small white casket with gold trim being carried down the steps of St. Rose of Lima Church in Brooklyn.
Fr. Peter Colapietro, the sanitation department’s chaplain, told the grieving parents that the boys were “held securely in God’s embrace for now and all eternity.”
While there was no mention of the neighbors who refused Glenda’s cries for help as she searched for her boys, thoughts of this hung in the backs of people’s minds.
Moore’s neighbor, Steven Vitale, said “this should never have happened.”
“They were the sweetest little things,” he said of the toddlers. “This is the best family you could ever have met. This is the worst family that this could happen to. It’s heartbreaking.”
On October 29, Glenda - a nurse at Lutheran Medical Center – packed her boys up in the family SUV and set out for her sister’s house in Brooklyn to escape the storm. The vehicle stalled in the rising waters and as the frantic mother freed the boys from their car seats, a wave overtook her and snatched them from her grasp. She pounded on a few doors along Father Capodanno Boulevard in a futile attempt to get help and spent the night huddled on a doorstep before flagging down an emergency the following morning.
When the Moores returned to the scene of the tragedy the morning after, Glenda angrily confronted the man who refused her. “I asked you to help me, you bastard!” she screamed at the man, according to Irish Central.
She approached the man in a rage and had to be restrained by police officers, said another neighbor, George Calve, 63. The man maintains that he thought he was being robbed.
Glenda’s sister told NY Daily News, “My sister’s like 5-foot-3, 130 pounds. She looks like a little girl. She’s going to come to you and you’re going to slam the door in her face and say, ‘I don’t know you, I can’t help you’?'”
The boys’ bodies were found on November 1.
