By Ray Sanchez, Dalia Faheid, CNN
New York (CNN) — 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.
“Tomás! Tomasito!” she cried.
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 removed debris and rubble from the site. Clothes still hung from a closet in an adjoining building where a wall came down during the collapse.
A 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 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.
‘Go in the church and pray, please’
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. Some, like the husband of a six-month pregnant woman rescued from the rubble, rejoiced as they received word their loved one was safe.
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.
“We express our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones, and we stand with them in profound solidarity in these moments of grief,” the consulate said.
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.
‘Nothing like this has ever happened in this neighborhood’
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 that 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.”
“In that moment, I knew she needed comfort,” she said.
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.”
And Katie Stevens, a teacher who lives about a block from the building, sobbed after she watched first responders load body bags into a van Thursday morning.
“I care for my neighbors so much,” Stevens told CNN. “I’m just so sad.”
James Williams, a bricklayer who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years, stood across the street from the wreckage site Thursday and recalled watching the building’s walls cave in the day before.
One image reverberated in his mind: a woman climbing a now-exposed staircase as everything around her was crumbling.
“I don’t know if she got out alive or not,” he lamented. “To see that and not know what happened to her…I might have to go see a psychiatrist.”
Williams said he knows multiple families affected by the collapse. A friend told him she had been texting with relatives at the site when it collapsed but had not been able to locate them at any local hospitals.
As grief rippled through the neighborhood, nonprofits and agencies including the Red Cross, NYC Human Resources Administration and World Central Kitchen helped shaken families with emergency shelter, supplies and updates about missing people.
Neighbors call for accountability
As darkness fell over the collapse site Thursday night, amid thunderclaps and heavy rain, floodlights shone on a now-idle backhoe that had been excavating piles of debris, twisted metal and the pieces of what had been apartments into dumpsters.
Crews finished a marathon search through the rubble and determined there were no more survivors to be rescued, officials had said Thursday afternoon.
Under umbrellas, people hurried home after work, some stopping momentarily to look at the now-vacant space that had recently been home to many.
Across the street, a cluster of older women started gathering early for an evening service at Bethesda Church of God in Christ.
“This church happens to be a Haitian Creole speaking church, but the church is open to the entire community,” said Florence Saint-Jean, a psychologist who offers mental health and trauma services at the church.
“The people who live here are immigrants, and so when crisis happens, there’s only one language – love,” she said. “People are tired, they’re looking for food, they’re looking for shelter, and the church is always open and available.”
As neighbors hugged and comforted one another, one question created knots in their chests: How could this tragedy have happened?
The Department of Buildings has not yet determined the cause of the collapse, and an investigation is underway as new information emerges about the building’s history and construction process.
New York officials are looking into what caused the collapse of the building built in 1930, with Mamdani vowing to hold anyone responsible “fully accountable” and authorities inspecting about 100 locations throughout the city linked to the site.
As investigators try to determine factors in Wednesday’s deadly collapse of the three-story building in Brooklyn, they’ll be looking at both the condition of the collapsed building and activity at the construction site that neighbored it.
Cracks had been reported in the facade of the building as part of the permitting process for construction on the adjacent lot, which the collapse spilled into.
The building’s owner, Olufemi Falade, has a troubling history that reportedly landed him in jail for 12 days in 2006 for failing to repair hundreds of violations across multiple buildings.
The collapsed building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue currently has 98 open housing violations – ranging from unsafe electrical wiring and a lack of smoke detectors to bedbug infestations and a lack of adequate water supply for the building’s sprinkler system – according to records from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. CNN has reached out to Falade for comment.
Though building collapses are rare in the US, lower-income and immigrant neighborhoods often face higher risks of hazards and neglect.
Housing experts and advocates have pointed to systemic inequities that disproportionately impact working class immigrant communities, including old buildings, lax code enforcement and rapid construction.
Sumathy Kumar, executive director of New York State Tenant Bloc and Housing Justice for All, an organization that works to organize tenants, said the Brooklyn landlord has an extensive and troubling history with the city.
“We need better and faster tools to hold landlords accountable and to make sure that buildings are properly maintained and managed,” Kumar said.
Saint-Jean said there is a visible distinction between how development occurs in immigrant communities like Flatbush.
“What we’re most concerned about is, when things like his happen, that our voice (is) not being heard about development in the area,” she said.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
CNN’s Ray Sanchez reported from New York and Dalia Faheid from Los Angeles. CNN’s Gloria Pazmino, Eduardo Cuevas, Brynn Gingras, Graham Hurley, Taylor Romine, John Miller and Holly Yan contributed to this report.
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