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Boys Swept to Their Death During Sandy Will Share a Single Coffin

By  Jeff Mays and James Fanelli | November 8, 2012 7:38pm 

DYKER HEIGHTS—The two Staten Island boys swept from their mother's arms and to their deaths in Hurricane Sandy's raging floodwaters will be laid to rest in a single white coffin.

Brendan Moore, 2, and Connor Moore, 4, were swept away from their mother Glenda Moore the night of the storm. Moore, who is married to city sanitation worker Damien Moore, was with the boys in her car when it stalled as she fled down Father Capodanno Boulevard in an effort to seek safety with family in Brooklyn.

After the boys were torn from her by the rising water, Glenda Moore sought help from neighbors who allegedly turned her away.

"She's very sad, as you can imagine, because...nobody opened the doors. That is a sad part. That is a sad part," said Father Ilyas Gill of Mary Queen of Heaven in Mill Basin, who said the homily at a wake for the boys Thursday afternoon.

The brothers lay together in a coffin surrounded by several flower arrangements at Scarpaci Funeral on 86th Street in Brooklyn.

Gill said Damien Moore was struggling to make sense of the tragedy.

"I spoke to Mr. Damien. ...He said, 'At this time we know it's hard but maybe God has a plan.'"

Dozens of sanitation workers, many still wearing their green uniforms, as well as nurses clad in white who worked with Glenda Moore, filed in and out of the funeral home all afternoon.

Guy Victor, whose wife is Glenda's godmother, said it was fitting for the two boys to be buried together in one coffin.

"That's family," he said. "Those boys belong together. They should be together."

Victor called the man who allegedly would not let a distraught Glenda Moore into his home after the boys were lost an "animal."

"He's not a human. They are the devil and not human to do that," Victor said.

The boys' bodies were found three days after the storm following intensive searches at McLaughlin Street and Olympia Boulevard.

According to neighbors, Moore confronted the man who would not let her inside his home one day after her sons drowned.

"I asked you to help me, you bastard!" Glenda Moore screamed at the man, according to his neighbors.

Gill said he addressed the situation in his homily.

"I spoke that it is hard that nobody opened the doors," he said outside the funeral home. "But God has some plan, that [the boys] are angels for me. They're angels and they're going to pray for you. That is my belief. That's the way we can console them now. They have become angels."

Julien Gilkes, a maintenance worker at the same nursing home where Glenda Moore works as a nurse, said he and his fellow staff members were in shock at what happened.

"I can't believe it. It's very hard," Gilkes said. "She's a good woman. A very good woman and a very good mother. Everybody's sad."

He said he and Moore would often compare notes on their young sons.

"She's always talking about her boys. [Connor] played piano and she was so proud of him," he said.

"There's nothing you can say to them at a time like this."

The funeral will be held at St. Rose of Lima Church in Kensington on Friday.