Part 1

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Rafael Hernández woke up before six in the morning and sat up on the edge of his bed. He had gone through rough days - he missed his children and the monotony of his job as a salesman in a New York TV store was driving him crazy- but that Tuesday, he woke up in a better mood. Arned Azis, his employer, a Pakistani Muslim, had given him a few days off to recover from six weeks of work without a break. He washed his face, brushed his teeth, got dressed, checked his pockets to make sure he had his keys and the badge he always carried with him, and left the apartment he was renting on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. 

He was accompanied by Jaime, a Mexican friend with whom he shared a room. They walked past the taquerias and boarded the subway, which at that time of day was running at full speed, loaded to the hilt with Wall Street executives, waiters, doctors and construction workers.

When the train emerged from the tunnel, the silhouette of Manhattan came into view lit up by an autumn sun. They had planned to spend a few days in the casinos of Atlantic City. On the subway they shared opinions about which company they would travel with, a couple of them gave away $30 gambling coupons.  They would meet a couple of Peruvian lady friends at 8:30, three blocks from the World Trade Center. Hernandez had dressed himself up as a tourist: t-shirt, jeans and sneakers.

They arrived half an hour early and walked to the corner of Fulton and Church street. Hernandez, at 5'5", with chocolate skin and a hooked nose, had the body of a wrestler--a broad back, arms like tubes and the chest of an opera singer. He felt hungry and walked to a shop where he bought coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich. When he got back, he found his friend reading the New York Post.

“It’s getting late and the ladies haven’t shown up. Do you think they´re coming?”, he asked.

The next few seconds were total confusion: a roar in the sky, the belly of an airplane hanging low, an explosion, a huge mushroom of smoke and fire. Hernandez thought it was one of those movies being shot in New York. Years earlier, he had watched a scene in the streets of Manhattan in which Samuel L. Jackson flipped a patrol car, and the fire and the injured were so real that they did not seem like fiction.

“Do you think that’s a movie stunt?”, Hernandez shouted.

His friend was mute, his eyes bulging, his hands on his head. They ran away from the towers. The people around them stared at the vertical buildings framed by a cloudless sky. A whirlwind of paper and metal pieces came over them. They had found safety but Hernandez suddenly stopped. His duty was back at the towers.  He asked Jaime to have their Peruvian friends wait for them: he would go back and try to volunteer his help.   

Rafael Hernandez was a fireman.

He knew that in the next few minutes a great mobilization would take place. He had learned that as a child, amid stories of rescues by the squad of firemen his father was part of in Mexico City.  Even before he grew a moustache, Hernandez began to feel a relentless attraction to emergencies. When he was 14, he stepped into the flames that devoured the Astor building in Mexico City. Three years later, he was already a paramedic and fireman. It was the beginning of a long journey that would take him halfway around the world through hurricanes, fires and earthquakes.

Hernandez rushed towards the World Trade Center. Halfway there, he ran into the fire station at Liberty and Church street. He reached into his right pocket, approached a man who was shouting out orders and showed him his Heroic Mexican Fire Department badge, a golden heart shaped plate of metal.

"I'm here to help. I'm a fireman, I'm Mexican," he introduced himself.

“Get a helmet and a jacket from the station and follow those men”, the captain ordered. He was a husky blond with the name Jefferson on his shirt.

Hernandez hung the badge around his neck and when he reached the World Trade Center, he saw a dozen shaky police officers trying to communicate with other officers through portable radios. One of them said that they were getting ready to evacuate the people from the tower. 

Hernandez looked up at the sky again. There must be thousands of people trapped in the tower. Someone shouted that the elevators were out of order and the stairways were blocked. A group of firemen ran towards the emergency elevators and he went after them. Two men forced the door with a special wrench.  When it opened, the shaft belched a tongue of fire.

Hernandez kept looking up at the top of the building. The column of smoke had spread, and it was hard for him to see clearly. He gave it a hard try, noticed a line of fire and figured that it must be the seventieth floor. A policeman grabbed him by the arm and shook him hard.

“There’s a woman with a broken ankle near the entrance of the building”, he said. “Go help her.” 

He went out to the street and came to a stop two steps away from the door. He took a quick look around the area and found the woman, just when something happened right next to him. He felt a light gush of wind and heard a thud. He didn’t know what it was. He looked up into the sky again and suddenly understood. There were people throwing themselves off the building.

A man fell next to him and then a woman crashed into the ground a little further away. She was holding a baby in her arms. “This can’t be real”, Hernandez told himself, closed his eyes and shook his head. He quit looking for the woman with the broken ankle. He was thinking about the people trapped in the skyscraper and the anguish they must be feeling, engulfed by the fire. In twenty-five years as a fireman he had never seen anyone jump to their death to escape death. “What the hell is this? -he asked-. My God, how are we going to help them?”

When he came out of shock he ran to where some thirty firemen and paramedics were rushing up the stairs. He joined them and several floors above a captain separated them. He was told he could not go further up because he had no protection other than a jacket, gloves and a helmet. He was on the 28th floor.

“There is a pregnant woman in labor”, the guy said, pointing towards a corner. “Take care of her. Take her outside and hand her over to the paramedics”.

She was blue-eyed, blonde, with a huge belly. He picked her up without a word and started to carry her downstairs. He heard people screaming in panic, and, as he went down the stairs, he saw people with burns on their faces, arms and legs.

On the other side of the glass wall he could observe a column of smoke coming out of the south tower. All of them, except for the old and wounded, were running down the stairs out of control. Some collided head on with the firemen on their way up.  

Hernandez was having a hard time walking down the stairs, trying to keep his balance in the middle of the crowd. It was hot and the smoke from the floors overhead had lowered enough to cloud his vision and make him cough. He was sweating and trying to think straight. The woman’s weight made him feel like he was carrying three people.

A few floors down, he felt a tug at his pants. It was a young black woman with burns over most of her body. “Help me please”, she said. He promised to come back for her.

On the fifteenth floor he took a break next to the stairs.  His arms hurt and he was gasping for air. He put one knee on the floor and rested the blonde on his other leg. For a moment, he thought about leaving her there so he could help the black woman he had left behind on the floor above. He thought to himself that she needed him more than the blonde, but he also thought that a fireman always follows orders.

It was then when he heard the blonde’s voice for the first time. It was as if she had read his mind: 

“Don’t leave me here”, she said and held on to his neck so hard it hurt. She was sobbing and her body was shaking. Her voice was weak, almost imperceptible. “Don’t leave me in this hell”, she begged.

“Don’t worry, I won’t leave you here”, said Hernandez They were in a corner and next to them the crowd kept running over each other. Many of them fell to the ground.

“What’s your name?”

“Allison”, she said and hugged him again tightly.

On the fourth floor he heard himself saying: “Take it easy. Take it easy.”. He felt that he couldn’t take it anymore that he would collapse with the woman in his arms at any moment. “Don’t give up”, he told himself, but he couldn´t help feeling it was all over. Suddenly, thugh, his legs began to move quickly, while his shoulders pushed against the people in his way. He stumbled twice, then regained his balance, and continued his mad descent. 

On the second floor, he told himself that he had to get the hell out of there. He ran down the escalator and again heard screams and a pounding on the floor. He went out into the street; a police officer blew a whistle and two young paramedics rushed toward him. They opened the doors and Hernandez placed the blonde lady on a stretcher. They put an oxygen mask over her mouth, loaded her into an ambulance and headed for a hospital.

Hernandez was exhausted. His arms felt like two heavy threads and his legs were shaking. He couldn’t walk. He kneeled to fill his lungs with air. Dozens of people lay around him. The paramedics were placing tags on people’s clothes: red for urgent care, yellow for non-urgent care, green for those who could walk. Black for the dead.

He inhaled fiercely. A minute or so had passed since he had made it to the street, then his knees felt an intense rumbling, as if a giant were drumming his fingers on the ground. He heard a thunderous noise, like that of an approaching train, and saw dozens of police officers and firemen running. Some were stripping off their jackets and throwing away their gloves and helmets and shouting:

“Run!”

“Get out of here!”

“My God!”

Hernandez was dragging his legs with difficulty. He managed to scramble a bit and only stopped when someone ran past him, tapped his shoulder and shouted something he couldn’t understand. He stopped and when he raised his eyes, he realized he was running in the wrong direction: the tower was shaking like a wounded beast. He turned around and ran as fast as he could. Then he heard a thundering noise. The building was collapsing, its insides belching out a gigantic black cloud.  

A few steps away was a fire truck. He threw himself on the ground and crawled underneath.

Day turned to night. Everything went dark and he couldn’t see his hands. He felt the earth shaking and heard concrete walls crashing into the ground. Debris was falling on the truck. He closed his eyes and wanted to pray, but he, a Christian, had forgotten his prayers. He closed his eyes tightly and said:

“My God, protect me, don’t let anything heavy fall here. My God don’t let me die”. He had his hands over his head and was curled up under the truck. “My God, if I only came here to help, why are you taking me away? My God, I rest my soul in your hands”.

When the noise stopped, he thought he was dead. In the darkness of his eyelids he could see himself as a child, he saw his dead grandmother, his parents, his brother and sisters. He wondered where he was, and whether he was dead or alive. 

The dust cloud covered everything. He tried to breathe through his nose under a piece a cloth he had torn from his shirt. When he could finally see his hands, he felt the side of the truck and found a nozzle: he opened it, rinsed his mouth and spit. The dust from the giant cloud was burning his body. He placed his face and hands under the water jet, stood up and heard a scream.

It was a black police officer, an overweight man who couldn’t breathe, he opened his mouth desperately, like a giant fish out of the ocean. Henandez pulled him under the fire truck, opened the nozzle and splashed water on the man’s face several times.

A few minutes later, he came back out when he heard voices. He vaguely remembered a police officer asking him if he was alright. He couldn’t think straight or get a word out. He bent over, leaned on his knees and realized he had wet his pants.

His jaw felt dislocated, his ears clogged. Another police officer came up, told him that several people were hurt nearby and asked him to come with him. He ran towards entrance number five of the North Tower parking lot, when he heard the earth rumbling again and saw the same image: the building was convulsing and starting to collapse as if it were made of sand.

At that moment, he was overcome by a fear he had never felt before. He ran toward Vesey street. Many people were running beside him. He passed next to a Latino cameraman with a camera on his shoulder. He had one knee on the ground and wasn’t moving. He told the guy to get up, and pulled his arm, but the man did not respond. “Come with me, brother”, he said again, but it was as if he were talking to a sphinx. He grabbed him by the belt and dragged him a few yards to a cigar and soda shop.

He opened a door, pushed the cameraman inside and found an Asian man in charge of the place. Two French women were crying and talking on the phone. He asked where the basement was and followed the man. The guy pointed to a space on the floor, Hernandez opened it, shouted at everyone to get inside and shut the door. The women hugged each other, and they could hear screams from the street. At that moment he started feeling ill. We are at war, he thought. They are going to kill us. I am going to die. He closed his eyes and saw his three children.

The basement was dark and hot.  The French women were crying. The cameraman still speechless. Twenty minutes later, Hernandez announced that he would go outside to find out what was going on. When he reached the street, he felt his heart draw tight.

He had taken part in rescues after earthquakes in Mexico City, Nicaragua and Guatemala, the eruption of the Mount Ruiz volcano in Colombia that buried the city of Armero, and had never seen such devastation  The dust cloud had dissipated and he could see a smoking mountain of concrete and twisted metals.

He saw a group of firemen stirring through the rubble and kneeling on the ground shouting for signs of life. He adjusted his gloves and helmet and began to remove debris.  He didn’t stop to rest or eat for the next eight hours, focusing on just one urgent repetitive action: lifting pieces of concrete and metal, shouting “Is anyone down there?”, then staying silent to listen.

The group he was working with found a fireman under the ruins of one of the towers.  He felt helpless.  He kneeled and asked, “Why, God, why?”

At six o’clock in the afternoon, when ne found himself in the rubble of the northern zone, he felt a prickle in his chest.  It felt like an army of ants crawling up his throat, making it hard to breath.  He put his hands on his knees and tried to inhale but he began to cough.  He coughed furiously for several minutes until a paramedic showed up and put an oxygen mask on his mouth and removed dust from his throat with a tube.

“Do you want to go home?”

“No.  I’m okay, I feel fine. I’m staying.”

Hernandez worked until 10:30 p.m., when he could no longer stay on his feet. He walked three blocks to St. Paul’s Chapel on Fulton street, where someone had set up a camp for rescuers and volunteers. A doctor examined him, and a soldier offered him an orange helmet and a pair of overalls, one blue and one orange.  He washed up, nibbled on a sandwich and slept on the wooden benches meant for parishioners.

At midnight sleep overcame him, dreams filled with unsettling things. He had shattered dreams of the tower, fire, people leaping around. He woke up every few minutes.  At five o’clock in the morning he heard soldiers shouting, calling for volunteers.

He went with them, but they had no luck.  Phones were ringing from inside briefcases buried under the ground. There were corpses, mutilated bodies, hands and legs without an owner.  As he was lifting blocks of stone, he realized that in his 25 years as a fireman, he had never seen anything like it.

Two hours passed and an angry sun covered the area. The temperature climbed throughout the day helped by small fires. Night came and things got worse. There was no light. Light bulbs exploded. A power plant installed by the army was ruined.  He could barely believe that all of this was happening inside of the United States.

The night of the second day, as he was retiring to rest, a soldier lent him a satellite phone.  He called his children’s home in Mexico City and his ex-wife answered the call. They spoke for a few minutes and then his children came to the phone. Sharon, eight, Aurora, six, and Nicolas, four.

“Dad. Come back. Take a plane and come back now,” Aurora insisted. “Are you at war? Is someone after you?”

“Sweetheart, I’m all right. Everything is okay. We’re not under attack.  I´m going to be here for a few ore days.  I have to help.”

As the days dragged on, several rescue teams were organized. There was a team of diggers, to which he belonged, in which men equipped with buckets would use their hands to remove stones. They did not use machines to avoid possibly hurting people. Another team was dedicated to caring for injuries. There were hundreds of rescuers working day and night, using nothing but their hands.

He woke up again the next few nights to the shouts of military personnel. He put on his helmet and went to a certain spot where a group of men gathered in silence, trying to hear the slightest sign of life under the rubble.  A whimper. A clatter of metal.  A voice pleading for help.

Most of the people who sifted through the rubble were Hispanic. That provoked mixed feelings. He felt both pride and anger at the same time: the city government gave $300 to contractors to pay workers for eight hours of labor. The contractors, in turn, paid $80 to those who were hired to remove the rubble.

Hernandez squeezed his way into every place he could, a large crack, a dark hole, between two walls. Three days after the attacks he found a man trapped near the Disney store and a Kodak development warehouse. He was able to smell the silver nitrate from large spilled containers. Part of his rescue equipment was a lamp and a radio he used to sound the alarm.  He often wore a green shirt with the coat of arms of Mexico, a gift from a woman he talked to one day near the fenced off area around Ground Zero.

The man, around fifty years old, had been pressed between two walls.  He was covered with dust and his chest was burst open close to his heart.  He told Hernandez his phone number and asked him to call his wife and daughters. “Tell them I will love them forever.” Soon a team of sixteen rescuers showed up with giant scissors that cut through the concrete as if it were paper.  It must have been twenty minutes before they could pull him out of the trap into which he had fallen.  He died that same day.

The following day, Hernandez arrived at the camp located at the dock, where victims’ families were being cared for. He took a piece of paper from his overall and dialed a phone number. A woman answered. He gave her the man’s message and told her where he had found her husband. “You will have to go to the morgue,” he said.  “There was nothing more I could do for him. I’m sorry.”

The camp at St. Paul’s Chapel and been converted into a command center.  There were pallets, pillows and warm food. It was the only place where he felt at ease.  During the day, several doctors had a look at the rescue team and a group of nuns were there to help comfort them. Many spoke Spanish. They massaged their arms and legs and told them that could talk about what they were going through, if they felt like it. “If you want to cry, go right ahead,” said a nun one afternoon.

Hernandez felt his soul undone by so much death.  But he was not there to cry.  He was there to help.

One day his friend, Jaime, came to the camp. On the day of the attacks, after the police had cordoned off the area, he had waved goodbye with his hand held high.  He told him that the ladies from Peru never showed up and that he had gone back to their apartment in Queens. They gave each other a hug and he handed him an envelope with two thousand dollars.  It came from his employer, the Pakistani Muslim. A mob had beaten him in Queens, his wife’s clothes were torn off and he had decided to return to his country.

During the following days Hernandez would that same sensation of fear that he felt in his chest and throat on the day of the attacks came back.  It happened mainly at night, when he was working at Ground Zero and unannounced fighter planes flew very low into the sky, or when military helicopters cast a powerful light

He had the sensation that one of those planes would appear at any moment and drop a bomb.  It was a recurring thought and when it popped into his mind, he told himself that no matter what happened he would not move from the place where he stood.  If he fled, he could fall into a pit and end up buried under tons of concrete.  If he stayed there, without moving, he would at least die on top of the ground.

Everything he found under the rubble -bags, cell phones, briefcases, pieces of clothing - he would put in plastic containers. The moments that hurt the most were when a fireman or a policeman was found dead.  He felt somehow that the person was a brother he’d never met.  All work would then stop, and sirens would sound.

One afternoon, when he was taking a break, a fireman offered him a cigarette.  Hernandez didn’t smoke but decided to take it.  He left the chapel and walked over to the fence.  Opposite him stood a black woman.  She motioned him with her hands to come closer. She told him she needed his help.  She had spent nine nights sleeping there. She showed him a picture of two women. “These are my daughters. Help me find them.”  He told her he couldn’t, that he was only there as a volunteer.  She persisted. He took the photograph and returned to camp.

He walked over to the place where the people in charge of gathering bodies and sending them to the morgue were at work. He spoke to one of them and showed him the photograph.  “We’re not supposed to do this,” he replied “but I just can’t stand seeing these people wander around day and night without finding their loved ones.” He took the photograph and walked away.

In the evening the guy handed him a piece of paper.  Hernandez walked back to the place where he had gone to smoke.  The woman was sitting there, awake.  He told her that he was sorry, that her daughters were in the morgue.  She began to weep and threw herself against the fence, trying to hug him.  “God will reward your kindness,” she said. “He’ll give you a place to rest.”

When he went back to the chapel, he couldn’t take it anymore. The emergency lights illuminated the whole disaster along with the tents where the police were tagging bodies.

He got down on the floor and cried.

He wept, sobbing, covering his face with his hands, trying not to be heard. He then caught voices coming from behind him and turned. He saw rescue squads beginning to move.  He wiped his tears with dirty hands, stood up and went back to work.

Hernandez spent seventy-two days at Ground Zero.  On November 11, 2001, he was removing flagstones and pieces of metal, still searching for survivors, when he looked into the bucket that he always carried with him: All that his hands had stuffed in there were shreds of clothing, dry skin and bones.

He stared into space, breathed heavily and found himself in another world.

He went back to the chapel, turned in his helmet and overalls.  There was nothing left for him to do.  His mission was over.

July 2011

Hernandez lived in Queens, a six-by-twelve-foot room, in an apartment he shared with a guy from Colombia and some other migrants.  His room was clean and tidy.  On the walls were pictures of his daughters, a fireman’s boot and an image of himself from the New York Times.  Himself standing, with an orange helmet, next to a group of firemen engaged in removing the rubble of the World Trade Center.

In that micro world he had everything he needed to live: five small bottles full of pills and an oxygen respirator.  A blue plastic mask was hanging on the wall.  Without it, he would suffocate in his sleep.

Through the speakers connected to his iPhone, Jobim’s voice came alive, soft, hypnotic, anesthetic. “Helps me relax,” says Hernandez. “He listens to it often, lying in bed for six hours, breathing in oxygen from the machine. He usually tunes in when he is tired of feeling the mask as a second face, saddened that when he sleeps with it he wakes up the next day with a red oval mark from his forehead to his chin.

Hernandez had been working as a waiter in a catering company in Houston.  One day, four years after the attacks, he felt a tightening in his chest and collapsed.  He was told at the hospital that his lungs were clouded.  They asked if he worked with asbestos.  He told them no, but that he had lived at Ground Zero

He was back in New York a few days later, at Mount Sinai Hospital, where they did a series of tests and reported nodules, dust cells and lung filtrations.  Doctors diagnosed him with rhinitis, rhinosinusitis, pharyngitis, asthma and chronic allergy. A fireman friend told him that it was within his rights to sue.  Hernandez was called to testify in court.

At the final hearing, he sat before a judge, two jurors and seven lawyers.  He answered hundreds of questions over the course of nine hours. Did his father smoke? What did his grandmother die of? Did he suffer from asthma before? Who called him into the World Trade Center?

“No one called me, Your Honor.  I decided to go in there.  I didn’t know anyone.  I saved lives as though they were my own children.  I never doubted what I should do.  If were to happen again today, I would do the same.”

Judge Peter Georgalos ruled in favor of Hernandez, during March 2010, and granted him lifetime medical care.  In New York Court Resolution WBC 00804564, the judge ruled that the Mexican volunteer suffered from asthma, obstructive sleep apnea, rhinosinusitis, post-traumatic stress, and depression.  Hernandez is waiting for the resolution of another lawsuit to be settled as part of the Zadroga Law, which compensates firemen, paramedics and rescuers.  The judge prohibited any work requiring physical effort. Since that time court agents have made unannounced visits to check on him and have studied his oxygen chamber to validate its use.  Hernandez lives on loans from his friends and donations from businessmen in Sonora and the State of Mexico.  The government of Mexico gave him $1,000 for eight months after he offered copies of a recorded telephone conversation with a government official who told him that President Calderon saw no reason to give him any aid.

One Saturday in July, I paid him a visit in his Queen’s apartment.  It was ten years later, and Hernandez still retained the body of a wrestler, although he had lost weight and those tube-like arms now looked like pipes.

He wore dark glasses, a T-shirt, shorts and a silver chain around the neck. Before closing the door, he shouldered his backpack where he always carries four essential bottles of medicine, a backpack with his name and the motto: “Health for Heroes”.

We boarded a bus to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens and ordered mole enchiladas and a Squirt at Sol Azteca.

He told me he planned to return to Mexico in a few months. He missed his children and he missed emergencies, even though he knew those times were over. He worked guiding groups of a hundred men and women of Latin origin who worked at the World Trade Center. He helped them translate documents and guided them through courts. Between enchiladas and dessert, he received three calls from them.

As we left the restaurant, a woman stopped him to say hello.  It was a María, a Colombian woman who also worked removing the rubble.

“Bad news the last couple of days,” she said, referring to a Zadroga Law notification in which rescue workers and cleaners were to receive compensation in two parts, twenty three percent to defined in September and the rest in 2016.

“Keep fighting. Never give up,” Hernandez told her.  María shrugged her shoulders and kept walking down Roosevelt Avenue.

Hernandez told me that the worst is not the illness or delayed payments into the compensation fund, but the nightmares and the sudden onslaught of memories.

In his sleep he often sees New York under a hail of bombs. When memories engulf him, he has visions of people throwing themselves into the void.  Anxiety overwhelms him. Then, as in the restaurant, he cries like a child and tremors shake his body. 

Three years before he had thought about killing himself.  Stricken with the urge to hang himself, he called Dr. Alicia Hurtado, his psychiatrist.  The thought of killing himself seems to have left him.

“I know this will eventually pass”, Hernandez says with a hint of hope in his doleful eyes. “I don’t know when, but someday it will pass.

September 2011

On the day of the tenth anniversary of the attacks, Hernandez attended two tributes where he was given homage as a hero.  He was preparing to go back to Mexico in December to undergo an operation in February 2012. “They will remove a sandy crust between my nose and cheekbones that keeps me from me from breathing,” he told me.  That night Discovery Channel aired six stories about Twin Towers survivors, one about him.  The fireman felt proud.  He watched the show with phone in hand, talking with his children, Auirora, Sharon and Nicolas.

We talked again on Friday, September 23rd.  He told me that one of his daughters had a birthday coming soon. He wanted to sell a Cassio watch so he could buy her a present.

The next day his Colombian friend, Jaime Munebar, came to visit him at his home. They had shared a flat for seven years with another friend. On Sunday, September 25, Jaime went to mass.  He returned in the evening, knocked on the door and there was no answer.  When he was finally able to enter, Hernandez was lying in bed.

The fireman that no one called was dead.

The funeral took place in Queens, a rainy Thursday.  His children were unable to travel but the Latinos that Hernandez helped in the courts were there.  It was a tearful crowd, wreaths and flowers.  When prayers were over, Munebar approached Consul Mario Cuevas and said, “Help us so that the United States does not back down from this. The compensation that Rafael fought for belongs to his children.” The forensic office had some organs removed from his body to be examined, but his body wasn’t moved to Mexico until the first of October.

Farewells to heroes are too often not as they should be.

Three months later, the New York coroner’s office had not ruled on the causes of death.  In court, the Hernandez case was being detained with no word about the compensation he would receive at this time.  Hernandez’ room was closed by the police.  One day someone broke the seals and ransacked the room.

Munebar was able to rescue the last of his friend’s belongings and holds on to them as something sacred.

In a warehouse in Queens lies the oxygen respirator that kept Hernandez alive his last few years.