A video verified by The New York Times shows a family’s reaction as their Brooklyn apartment building collapsed. They survived a catastrophe that killed eight other people.
The toddler was sitting on the floor of his family’s third-floor apartment, playing with his toys, when his mother began to scream.
His older brother dashed past him, from the kitchen to a bedroom of apartment No. 3, with a carton of milk in hand. Suddenly, the walls began to quake and rumble.
Within seconds, they caved in. And debris tumbled down.
As the windows were blown out and the floors trembled, the toddler, Joseph, 2, tried to crawl backward, footage from a surveillance camera in the family’s Brooklyn apartment shows. The New York Times obtained the footage and verified it after speaking to the father of the boys, Anderson, who asked that his family members’ last name not be used to protect their privacy.
The surveillance video was reported on earlier by Gothamist and other news outlets.
It is unclear what caused the three-story apartment building in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to collapse on Wednesday afternoon. The building fell onto a neighboring construction site, killing eight people, including two children, and injuring at least 18 others, officials said. Rescue workers said on Thursday night that there were no more victims, after 24 hours of searching through the rubble.
Anderson said that he and his family lived on the top floor, in the apartment facing the street. He had been with his boys until 3 p.m. on Wednesday, when he left for his construction job painting walls in the Bronx. He had just settled in when he received a frantic call from his wife.
