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Health care workers around the world risked their lives — and those of their families — to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
(Photo courtesy of Italo Brown)
Eleven workers, from the factories and farms to the highways and supermarkets, tell how they got themselves — and us — through a catastrophic year.
(Photo by John Burchan)
THE BRONX — Here's what investigators know: A California man who went missing in 2004 was shot in the head. He was stuffed into a wooden crate about a decade ago and, this month, that box was found in the Throgs Neck marina.
But how the crate arrived at the marina, and who put it there, remains a mystery. Various people involved in this whodunnit have given conflicting stories about what they believe happened.
James Michael Brannon, 60, was discovered under a blue tarp inside the box last week. There were no arrests as of Tuesday afternoon, an NYPD spokesman said.
'IT WAS IN THE SAME SPOT'
Investigators initially believed that Brannon's death was tied to a 41-foot Marine Trader sailboat that used to be dry-docked near where he'd been found at Hammond's Cove Marina, at 140 Reynolds Ave.
A Polish immigrant and highly-skilled craftsman named Michael Szewczyk had been refurbishing the boat since he bought it in Maryland about 2006 until he died of a heart attack at work in February 2015 at the age of 57, a friend of Szewczyk said.
Read more here.
Related: TIMELINE: How a Missing Man Lived Before His Body Was Found in Bronx Crate
MANHATTAN — On the day Kea Fiedler was fatally struck by a Brooklyn-bound L train in Union Square, she seemed to have her whole life ahead of her.
The 27-year-old graduate student had just come from an exciting meeting with her college adviser who gave her apples for a pie she hoped to make with her serious girlfriend on their weekend getaway in Beacon, N.Y. She was tired, but looking forward to watching the second presidential debate that night with her girlfriend and some other friends.
When Fiedler was hit by the train at about 4 p.m. on Oct. 19, a schizophrenic woman — who was later charged with another subway shoving death — approached police at the scene and told them that she had shoved Fiedler into the side of the train.
But after detaining and questioning the woman, Melanie Liverpool-Turner, police decided she was making the story up, concluding it was a suicide because "three witnesses stated they saw her jump into the tracks," NYPD spokeswoman Jessica McRorie said Monday. Liverpool-Turner fatally pushed another woman in front of an oncoming train weeks after Fiedler's death.
But sources have also said that detectives have softened their stance on Fiedler's suicide theory, after finding the witness evidence inconclusive. They are now considering that the scholar, who hails from Germany, may have fallen, sources said.
"We think the police should try to find out more details about everything. They made it very easy for themselves," Fiedler's sister, Jana Richers, 40, who lives in Germany, told DNAinfo New York.
Read more here.
Matt Shaw wasn't supposed to be in New York in July 2012.
Shootings earlier that summer rattled his mother, Paula Shaw-Leary, so she sent her youngest of seven children, a 21-year-old finance major who had just been accepted to SUNY Albany for a masters degree in economics, to his sister's home in Georgia.
"I just for some reason had this feeling: Get him out of here, get him out of here, get him out of here," Shaw-Leary said. "But he wanted to come back and I couldn’t keep him."
Shaw was fatally shot in a case of mistaken identity outside the AK Houses at Lexington Avenue and East 128th Street about 1:30 a.m. on July 5, 2012, shortly after his return to the city.
Three years haven't eased Shaw-Leary's grief. On better days, she eats her breakfast and has strength enough to do some vacuuming and dusting.
But other days, especially when she hears about a new shooting, she relives each dark detail of her son's death.
“Most days, you’re all right,” Shaw-Leary said. "And then, some days, you just go back to day one."
Read more here.
Only 15 percent of drivers who killed pedestrians or cyclists have been charged under a law designed to increase penalties against drivers in the nearly two years since it took effect, a DNAinfo New York investigation has found.
And only 10 drivers among those who struck and injured 20,082 pedestrians and cyclists were charged under the new legislation — which was supposed "to give some teeth" to a bundle of laws that are part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's "Vision Zero" plan to eliminate traffic fatalities.
“This bill was the most dramatic of all of them in the way it was going to change the way people live their lives," said a City Council source who was involved in crafting the law, but who asked for anonymity because the person is not authorized to speak to the press.
Read more here.
UPPER WEST SIDE — With a sore left calf, 73-year-old David Obelkevich would be forgiven for sitting out the New York City Marathon this year.
But the retired music teacher from the Upper West Side is determined to complete the Nov. 6 marathon as he’s the only person to have finished the 26.2-mile race every year since it became a five-borough event 40 years ago.
"I may not be ready, but I’ll do it," Obelkevich said.
Read more here.
At the American Museum of Natural History on Tuesday, Hashim Kirkland lowered his camera a bit to see the ancient brown spine of a dinosaur through the murky glass catwalk below him. He clicked and then raised the camera again to capture the massive hip of an Apatosaurus, a long-necked plant eater.
“I’ve been fascinated by dinosaurs since I was a kid,” Mr. Kirkland said. “They’re so amazing and so big.”
But unlike most of the people in the hall clicking their shutters and gawking at the prehistoric beasts, Mr. Kirkland could not see the hulking skeletons clearly because he’s legally blind.
Read more here.
Photo by Glenna Gordon.
Hurricane Sandy destroyed everything James McCormick held dear.
He lost his partner of nearly a half century, a 64-year-old former Marine named David Maxwell, who returned to the couple's Midland Beach bungalow to protect it against the storm's wrath and was drowned in a surge along with their cat, Mittens.
He lost every photo chronicling their relationship — leaving him to rely only on his memory to picture his longtime love and the boisterous life they once lived in the '60s West Village and later on Staten Island.
“I don’t have a partner anymore. I have no more pictures of him. They’re all gone,” said McCormick, a 74-year-old Navy veteran who has been paralyzed on the left side since a stroke last March and who has lived at the Carmel Richmond Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center ever since.
Read more here.
Photo by John Moore for Getty Images.
One in three Americans knows someone who died from the coronavirus. We spoke to the people the pandemic left behind.