FINANCIAL DISTRICT — Godwin Ajala left his wife and three young children at home in Nigeria in the 1990s to study law in New York, working to pay his way as a World Trade Center security guard.
He was on the morning shift on Sept. 11, 2001.
While evacuating people from the buildings, the 33-year-old was struck by debris. Rescue workers later found him unconscious. He remained in a coma until his death four days later.
In Nigeria, Ajala’s countrymen hailed his bravery and dogged pursuit of a better life for his family.
But his heroic death didn’t bring his grieving kin closer together. Instead it sparked a bitter schism that remains to this day — and has left Ajala’s wife and children unable to collect $1.46 million in compensation from the U.S. government.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Ajala’s wife, Victoria, went to New York on a travel visa to collect her husband’s body but didn’t return to her children in Nigeria. Instead, she moved to the Bronx and later Canada to study nursing.
Her and Ajala’s three children say she abandoned them, forcing their paternal grandmother to care for them.
They’ve made that contention over the past decade in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court in hopes of stopping Victoria from receiving a share of the money from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
Under New York law, as next of kin Victoria and the three children are supposed to each get a certain percentage of the money. But until the case is resolved, the $1.46 million cannot be released to them and sits in an account with the city's Finance Department.
Time and again, the children have said that their grandmother, Mabel Ajala, deserves their mother’s cut of the money, which is about $600,000. The two oldest children, who are now grown adults, most recently made the claim in June.
“Ever since the burial of my dad, late Godwin Ajala, I have never been in contact or had anything to do with [my mother],” Ajala’s daughter Onyinyechi Ajala wrote in an affidavit she sent from Nigeria.
Onyinyechi, 21, said her grandmother, Mabel Udu Ajala, should get the money because she has been “fighting tooth and nail to train, feed and educate I and my siblings despite her old age.”
Ajala and Victoria’s son, Uchechukwu, 19, said in another affidavit that his mother has remarried and has at least two new children and is not dependent on his dead father’s money.
“Victoria Ajala does not care for me and my siblings’ needs, thus I don’t see why she should be entitled to [the $600,000],” he wrote.
Victoria, who lives in Ontario, Canada, and could not be reached for comment, has denied abandoning her children and has said that Mabel abducted them.
“The children were left in the care and custody of Victoria’s mother where the children lived for more than two years before Mabel came to kidnap them,” her lawyer wrote in a filing in 2010.
Since 2003, Mabel has prevented Victoria from seeing her children, according to the filing.
Victoria and her lawyer said that Mabel only took the children to try to get money from the 9/11 victim compensation fund. They added that Mabel has already received $380,000 in insurance money from Ajala's death.
“It is tragic and disheartening that [Ajala’s] children have been torn from their natural mother by the children’s paternal grandmother, who holds the children hostage for the [victim compensation] award,” Victoria’s lawyer wrote in the filing.
Before winning a U.S. green card in a lottery, Godwin Ajala was a lawyer in his homeland. When he moved to New York, his goal was to pass the state bar exam and set up a practice here while providing for his family in Nigeria.
He lived in a tiny Jamaica, Queens, apartment with a roommate and in his free time he studied for the law exam, his friend Christopher Iwuanyanwu said.
Iwuanyanwu, who was also a WTC security guard, worked nights from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., while Ajala’s shift was 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. They would have breakfast together every morning and talk about their families and dreams.
“I would always call him to wake him up,” Iwuanyanwu, 53, said.
He said Ajala, who stood nearly 7 feet tall, was a "happy and very lovely" man. Even after failing the bar exam twice, Ajala never got discouraged and was bent on passing it, according to Iwuanyanwu.
When Iwuanynwu, who is also Nigerian, visited his homeland, Ajala would give him money to hand to Victoria and his children. Ajala’s youngest daughter, Ugochi, was only 1 year old at the time of his death.
Iwuanyanwu said in the days after the terror attacks, he searched for Ajala, but only learned on the night of Sept. 14 that his friend was at New York Downtown Hospital, clinging to life.
Iwuanyanwu went to Ajala’s bedside on the morning of Sept. 15 and remained with him until he died at 5:05 p.m.
“From that day, I’ve been taking care of everything,” he said.
Iwuanyanu, who is now a maintenance man at Rockefeller Center, collected his friend’s belongings, including love letters to Victoria, and made burial arrangements.
He said Victoria intended to come to New York on a travel visa to escort her husband’s body home but, because of delays, he ended up bringing his friend back to Nigeria.
In late 2001, Victoria still used the travel visa to come to New York and remained in the U.S. after the visa expired. She moved in with Iwuanyanu and his wife in the Bronx and studied nursing at Hostos Community College.
Iwuanyanu said that main reason she stayed was to manage her husband's affairs and apply to the victim compensation fund.
With his help, Victoria became the co-administrator of her husband’s estate along with him.
They worked together to obtain the $1.46 million from the fund.
Before the money could be released, a surrogate’s court judge had to approve the distributions. But in 2005, Mabel, the grandmother, obtained guardianship of Ajala’s children and brought the proceedings to a halt.
Mabel said in court papers that Victoria lived with and had children with her son — but she never legally married him. Mabel even got a Nigerian court to rule that the two weren’t married.
The grandmother said in filings in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court that since they were not married, Victoria didn’t have a right to any of the victims compensation fund.
From there the case dragged on for years with sporadic developments.
A judge removed Mabel and appointed lawyers to act as guardians on behalf of each child until they were over 18. The judge and the appellate court also threw out Mabel’s charge that Victoria wasn’t married to Ajala.
In the past year, the case has slowly moved to a resolution with Victoria and Iwuanyanwu filing a final accounting of the money for the judge and how it should be distributed. Victoria will receive 42.5 percent of the money while, depending on their age, her three children will get between 16.1 percent and 23 percent.
But in June, the two oldest children objected to the percentages. A judge will still have to rule on the share each will receive.
None of the children could be reached for comment.
Iwuanyanwu, who is expected to receive a commission of $62,000 for his work, said he’s tried to contact Ajala’s children to resolve their differences, but they refuse to speak to him.
He said he just wants to ensure the money goes to the children — not to their grandmother.
“Let them have their money,” he said. “End this case. It’s been too long.”
Beyond her husband dying and being separated from her children, Victoria’s life has continued to take surprising turns.
During a break from nursing school in 2003, she decided to return to Nigeria. Before she left, she had been assured she had a student visa that allowed her to return to the United States.
However, when she tried to return to New York, she was denied entry because she had previously overstayed her travel visa.
Eventually, she moved to Canada which granted her a green card and later allowed her to become a citizen, according to Walter Stasiuk, her former lawyer in the estate case.
Stasiuk left the case a year ago when he went into semi-retirement and moved to New Hampshire.
He said that the past 14 years have been an odyssesy for Victoria and her children. He recalled once telling a judge that the case could be turned into a movie.
“We always used the joke that, aside from the victim’s compensation fund, the most valuable asset in the estate is the screenplay,” he said.
