EAST NEW YORK, Brooklyn (WABC) — A restless storm brought down thousands of trees in the area, including one at the Cypress Hills Houses in East New York, Brooklyn.
Leighton Brown was a maintenance supervisor there. He was walking by a massive tree on Saturday afternoon around 3:30 when part of it fell and hit and killed the 56-year-old.
Leighton Brown, NYCHA worker killed by fallen tree in Brooklyn on Saturday.
Roy Worth works in the park.
“There was a guy that was jogging and must have seen him, the guy under the tree and he was like, hurry and get the cones. There’s no way to survive that and they were pumping him for 15-20 minutes right there,” Worth said.
Friends say Leighton was excited and told him it was his last week working at the NYCHA complex because he had gotten a promotion.
“He was my good friend , short friendship but he was my good friend, we’d sit and talk for hours about life,” said his neighbor, Sam.
Sam lives across the street from Leighton in Canarsie and saw him shortly before he was killed.
“I said to him, ‘you going to come and give me a hand?’ And he said he has to go back to work again, asked for an extra shift,” Sam added.
Leighton never made it back.
“Broke my heart. He was a person who would come in without question and he did his job and he did his job well,” said tenant Kevin Duran.
The area is filled with giant trees. The one that fell and killed Leighton was not the first one to come down – a nearby one fell around 9 a.m. Saturday.
“It’s scary because you don’t know which tree is going to fall and I’m here cleaning the parks, it’s very scary,” said Worth.
Sam says his last conversation with Leighton is so bittersweet.
“I said ‘it’s good to see you’ and he said ‘it’s good to see you, we don’t know when we’ll see each other again,'” he says.
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