When Disaster Hit Next Door in Flatbush

Sheena Coleman turned 35 on Wednesday afternoon, and was looking forward to a night out. At around 4 p.m. she was at home in her second-floor apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her 6-year-old son, Hakeem, picking up things from the floor. Her 13-year-old daughter, Zariah, was out at the park, enjoying a school holiday. Their fussy cat, Issac, was somewhere in the next room.

Then Ms. Coleman felt everything shake.

She heard a roar from the direction of the children’s bedroom. Dust was somehow entering the apartment.

She darted into the room. There was a gaping space — “a big, big hole”— right above her daughter’s bed.

The children liked to lean against that wall to watch TV. Now it was letting in daylight.

That didn’t make sense. There was a building next door.

In her memory of those frantic moments, Ms. Coleman picked up Hakeem and swung him onto her hip. She then put him back down, and stepped out the door of her unit to where the hallway should have been.

That’s when the truth of what happened revealed itself.

“I could see the street,” Ms. Coleman recalled on Friday in an interview. “I could hear people screaming, ‘Get out! Get out!’”

The hall and the stairway to the first floor were now open to the air.

She could see construction workers in bright vests racing around below. She saw neighbors “laid out,” she said. She recalled recognizing a woman who was wearing only underwear and not moving. Her son asked, “Am I going to die?”

When the adjacent building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue collapsed on Wednesday into a neighboring construction site, lives collapsed along with it. Eight people died, and more than twice that number were injured. Dozens of New Yorkers were left to find new places to live.

Ms. Coleman and her family lived in the attached building next door, which was torn open like a dollhouse when the other structure went down.

She ran back inside her apartment to a window facing the street in front of the building. People below beckoned for her to climb down. Nope.

She returned to the open hallway, and a firefighter came up the stairs next to the void.

You have to get out, he told her. It’s not safe.

He beckoned for Hakeem, and she handed him over.

Their cat, Issac, was still somewhere in the apartment.

Ms. Coleman saw him. Then she turned away to find the cat carrier, and when she turned back — no Issac.

She entered the children’s bedroom. It felt off balance, and she was scared the floor might fall out from under her.

So she left. Without Issac.

Downstairs, she found a neighbor and told him to go to the park and find Zariah, her daughter.

Zariah pedaled home hard, thinking of her mother and little brother.

She arrived to an otherworldly scene. Police officers everywhere. Firefighters. And the wall on one side of her building, gone. She began to cry.

Then she saw her mother and brother, on the street.

“And my heart felt a little better,” Zariah said Friday. She was sitting with her family in a hotel lobby in Brooklyn, wearing a donated sweatshirt, still visibly shaken.

Despite the comfort of seeing her mother and brother, “I was so depressed,” Zariah said. “I’ve been there for years. This is my home, even though it has some problems.”

There had been mice — though Issac helped with those, Ms. Coleman said. Cockroaches. And the banging and noise from the nearby construction site, where workers had torn down a small building and dug the foundation for a new one.

On Friday, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, and city officials held a news conference to demand accountability for the collapse. The Coleman family was invited to share their story.

“The first thing I thought about was my cat,” Zariah said when it was her turn to speak. “I was going to go get him but I realized I didn’t know what I was going to face.”

A missing cat might have seemed trivial in light of the shattering loss of life. But in the disorienting, displacing aftermath, the teenager couldn’t help but think about her beloved pet. They had rescued him from a shelter in the Bronx about four years ago, and the girl named him Issac right away. It just came to her.

Standing now before the microphones, the words came faster.

“I just really hope they come and get our cat because he’s inside the house right now and they said they went inside the house to try to find him but I don’t think they really did,” she said. “He’s hiding from them and I think he’s scared of them and I just really want them to come and get our cat.”

She broke down in tears and stepped aside.

The police said Saturday that they were aware of the missing cat and would return him to the Colemans if he was found.

After the news conference, Ms. Coleman, now 35 years and two days old, returned with her unsettled but healthy children to their hotel room. Surviving a disaster of this magnitude is a reason to count one’s blessings.

The truth is that she cannot stop thinking about Issac, either. That moment in the apartment — looking for the cat carrier and losing the cat. Panicking, leaving.

That’s the part she keeps reliving.