The boys — Connor, 4, and Brandon, 2 — went missing Monday evening while mother Glenda Moore, a nurse at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, made a desperate attempt to flee from her Great Kills home to Brooklyn.
Moore’s Ford Explorer — packed with baby clothes, diaper bags and an umbrella — stalled on severely flooded Father Capodanno Boulevard in South Beach a few miles from her home. She got out of the car with the boys to ask for help.
By then, the waves were picking up speed and Moore lost her grip on toddler Brandon. The desperate mother clutched tighter to her older boy — but Connor, too, was swept away by the water.
She continued to search for the boys all night, knocking on neighboring houses for help, the children’s grandfather said. The distraught mother got none.
“She spent all night on the steps outside,” said the grandfather, who did not want to be identified. “Nobody wanted to help her.”
The mother was finally able to get help the next morning, when she was taken to a local hospital with hypothermia.
“It was an absolute nightmare,” said Iqbal Mughal, 46, a neighbor who rescued three other people stuck in the flood but did not hear or see Moore as she struggled to find her children.
“You couldn’t hear anyone screaming because the waves were so loud,” another neighbor explained.
“It’s one experience in my life that I’ll never forget,” added a shaken Mughal, who housed nearly 30 neighbors in the second floor of his home, whose first floor was flooded by more than 5 feet of water.
Moore was taken home yesterday morning, where she reunited with her husband, Damien, a city sanitation worker who was in Brooklyn during his wife’s harrowing search for Connor and Brandon.
Neighbors said the beloved parents looked “dazed.”
“They are beautiful little guys,” said neighbor Laurene Ryan, 62, of the boys. “I usually hear them playing in the yard. Connor always had a smiley face. They’re such nice people.
“This is so wrong. This is just unbelievable. There are no words.”
Another neighbor, Val Mironovich, 71, said, “They’re the two nicest people that live on this block. They’re very caring, hardworking people.”
Nearly 40 rescuers yesterday focused on nearby marshes, into which Moore’s SUV was pushed — and where the waves may have taken the children.
The search party carried pitchforks, shovels and wooden sticks to comb through the marshes, where water reached as high as 5 feet.
A helicopter equipped with a heat-seeking device hovered overhead, searching for any hints of life in the marshes. Rescuers aboard an airboat sifted through deeper waters for the kids.
Meanwhile, rescuers lifted debris and pulled out two other cars stuck in the marshes. A felled tree was removed.
Yet there was no sign of the two boys — and rescue efforts were suspended for the night.
NY POST
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