STATEN ISLAND — The devastated mom who lost her two children to the floodwaters of Hurricane Sandy angrily confronted her Staten Island neighbor the day after he allegedly turned her away when she came seeking refuge from the deadly storm.
"I asked you to help me, you bastard!" Glenda Moore screamed at the man she claimed ignored her pleas as she tried desperately to get inside his home, a neighbor said.
Moore approached the man in a rage and had to be restrained by cops as she visited the site the morning after the tragic incident, where her children had been swept away, said another neighbor, George Calve, 63.
Police said that Moore, who is married to city sanitation worker Damien Moore, banged on the doors of several neighbors on Father Capodanno Boulevard after floodwaters swept away her young children Brendan, 2, and Connor, 4, as the superstorm raged Monday night.
Moore, a nurse, had packed up her family and was trying to get to them to Brooklyn to seek shelter from the storm when her car stalled in the rising floodwaters.
The desperate mom was able to get her children out of the car, but they were swept away when a wave crashed into them.
The boys' bodies were found a short distance away near the intersection of McLaughlin Street and Olympia Boulevard Thursday morning after days of intensive searching.
On Tuesday, as the search for the boys continued, Moore returned to the neighborhood in a police car and began shouting at the man who she said turned his back on her plight.
When officers approached the man, he told them that he thought he was being robbed, according to Calve.
"The guy said that somebody threw a flower pot through the window," Calve said.
According those living along the road near where the bodies were found, the man also told them the next morning after the storm that he heard someone knocking on his back door and thought it was a burglar.
"The next morning he came out wrapped in a towel," said Eugene Brener, 19. "He said somebody knocked at the door and he thought they were robbing him.
"He said, 'I’m not going to open the door, I’m not crazy.'”
Another neighbor, Inna Butenico, said that the same man grabbed her by the hand and brought her to the back of his house.
"He brought me over and said someone tried to rob me — look what happened,” she said.
"He said somebody broke his back window on the night. He was very afraid somebody would take something."
On Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that he had spoken to the boys' father, who had been called into work during the storm.
"I did talk to him this morning and express to him as a parent my deepest sympathies," Bloomberg said.
"You are praying for them you are praying for their kids, we will do anything we can to help them. The loss of a child is something no parent should ever go through."
Connor and Brendan Moore are among the 22 people killed in the borough, the hardest hit, during the storm.
