Trapped in her car as a blinding snowstorm engulfed Buffalo, Anndel Nicole Taylor, 22, texted her family that she was scared. She had been calling emergency services for hours on Friday but kept being put on hold.
At midnight, with four feet of snow piling up on the ground and her car still stuck, she told her family she was going to try to get some sleep. “That was the last time we spoke to her,” said her older sister, Shawnequa Renee Brown, 35, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Taylor was found dead in her car on Christmas Eve.
A certified nursing assistant, Taylor had moved from Charlotte to Buffalo about two years ago, to care for their ailing father. On Christmas Day, the family gathered in North Carolina, mourning at what should have been a celebration. Taylor’s presents were under the tree, still wrapped.
“It was just a crying day,” Brown said. “All day long, we just cried.”
In western New York, nearly 30 people were reported dead after the mayor of Buffalo reported eight more fatalities on Tuesday morning.
Even as the rescue effort continued, officials and emergency workers were reeling from what they said was the extraordinary challenge of saving people in the blizzard.
The victims were a medical professional trying to get home for Christmas, a soonto-be father stepping out for milk. One man, found dead in a snowbank, died on his 56th birthday.
“They have been found a number of different ways,” said Mike DeGeorge, the spokesman for the Buffalo mayor’s office. “They have been found in stranded vehicles, they have been found on sidewalks, near street corners, some have been found in snowbanks. Some have been found because some have been without power since the storm began.”
In Charlotte, Taylor’s sister was making funeral plans, she said, and taking refuge in her favourite memories of Taylor, including the way her younger sister would belt out the chorus to her favourite song, Bless-Sin by Juiicy 2xs, and how easily she made friends.
Even as residents were warned to stay home, Abdul Sharifu was among those who took a chance. On Saturday, with his pregnant wife due to give birth next week, Sharifu, 26, ventured out in his car for groceries, according to a friend, Enock Rushikana.
On Monday, the body of Sharifu, a Congolese refugee who fled war in 2017 and resettled in Buffalo, was identified by a friend at the John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital.
He had been known by the nickname “911”, for his giving nature and propensity to drop everything to help others.
On Saturday, Christmas Eve, disturbing video of a body apparently frozen in a snowbank began circulating. It appeared to be William Clay, who went by Romello, according to a Go-Fund-Me for funeral expenses created by his sister, Sophia Clay. On that day, she wrote, he would have turned 56.
A part-time home health aide and part-time housekeeper at a hotel, Monique Alexander, 52, was also found partly buried in the snow on Delaware Avenue that day, according to her daughter, Casey Maccarone.
Late Tuesday afternoon, the Niagara County sheriff’s office announced the identity of another victim: Timothy M. Murphy, 27, who died from carbon monoxide poisoning on Christmas Day after heavy snow choked the external furnace of his residence in Lockport.
(New York Times News Service)