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“Bottom line, is that they don’t belong here,” one woman said at the latest protest against the temporary housing of asylum seekers in the red-voting borough.
arrow Jeanne-Marie Abinatti stands outside her salon on December 5, 2020 Gwynne Hogan / WNYC
Marcia Moreno still had her suitcases packed. She’d planned to visit family in Costa Rica, though those plans were put on hold indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 84-year-old had immigrated to Staten Island from Costa Rica in her twenties and raised her family in the borough’s New Dorp neighborhood.
“She was gonna go,” said her 59-year-old daughter Anayancy Houseman. “She loved to travel.”
Moreno was living alone and diligently isolating for most of the pandemic, her daughter said. But she fell in October, and was sent to a rehab facility where she was diagnosed with COVID in late November. She was transferred to Staten Island University Hospital a few days later.