![]() ![]() "I head over to Oakwood Plaza and the scene. Just after 5 a.m., Green received a text from her brother. Green said her father and brother drove to the apartment building to check on Garrett. I keep texting her and I’m like, ‘Okay, she’ll get back to me.’”Īs minutes turned into hours with no response from Garrett, the family began to worry. I’m just thinking maybe she fell asleep or did something else in the house. “All of a sudden she just stopped texting,” said Khadija Naim, a family friend who's known Garrett since she was 9 years old. Shakia Garrett, 33, died when floodwater overtook her first floor apartment in Elizabeth City, N.J. The night the storm hit, she had been texting family and friends to give them updates. Garrett moved into the apartment building a little over a year ago. Garrett, 33, died in the storm along with her neighbors Rosa Espinal, Espinal's husband, Jose Torres, and their son Jose Torres Jr. “She was trying to keep them calm through everything," Alissa Green said Saturday. Shakia Garrett was comforting her elderly neighbors and their son when floodwater crashed into the Oakwood Plaza in Elizabeth, New Jersey, quickly immersing their first-floor apartments, her older sister said. "I mean, you could only imagine you wake up in the morning and you hear about a storm that went through, and all of a sudden you find out that you had some family members perish." "Everybody's taking it pretty hard," he said. The family, along with a neighbor, Shakia Garrett, was found on the first floor. "They're great people."Įspinal, her husband, and their son, Jose Torres Jr., eventually moved to Oakwood Plaza Apartments in Elizabeth, where they died this week. "We essentially all lived together, right next door," he said. Other relatives, including Pascual Torres' family, also lived in Newark. The couple and their three children - two daughters and a son - initially settled in Newark, New Jersey. Rosa Espinal and her husband, Jose Torres, emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States in the late 1980s or early '90s to "work hard, to look for a better life, raise a family, live the American Dream," a cousin, Pascual Torres, said Friday. Janelle Griffith Rosa Espinal, 72 Jose Torres, 71 Jose Torres Jr., 38 "As old as he was, he was always willing to help us. "He was helping one of my aunts to finish her house," said Otto Bravo, 39, who lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey. ![]()
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