They Had Come From Afar to Build New Lives. Then, All Was Gone.

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Theirs was a story as old as New York. On a street in Brooklyn, immigrants had arrived to work and live, until their lives intersected in tragedy.

They Had Come From Afar to Build New Lives. Then, All Was Gone.

Theirs was a story as old as New York. On a street in Brooklyn, immigrants had arrived to work and live, until their lives intersected in tragedy.

Brenda Vasquez, 25, lost her husband, Edgar Santiago Sapón Gutierrez, 26, when an apartment building collapsed onto a Brooklyn construction site.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

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· 9:18 min

Nov. 14, 2026

They had landed in New York City after long journeys from Latin America and West Africa. Some had found work on a construction site in Brooklyn. Others, a home in the apartment building next door.

Two of the young men toiling at the construction site were from Ecuador, another was from Guatemala. All had arrived only a few years ago, all were fathers in their 20s hoping to provide for their young children.

Next door, in the building with four apartments, there were immigrants from Guinea — an Amazon worker, a food delivery driver — and families from Colombia, including a family of four that had just moved there after saving enough money to abandon a migrant shelter.

On Wednesday, their lives collided in a spasm of devastation.

Most, if not all, of the people whose lives changed in an instant when the apartment building tumbled into the construction site were immigrants.

All eight who perished, including three workers at the construction site and two children from Colombia who lived in the building, were born outside the United States. So were many of the 18 people who were injured.

The collapse of the building in the Flatbush neighborhood captivated the world, in part, because it reflected the world.

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