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De Blasio and staff still haven’t reached out to family of veteran city worker after vowing immediate response

The New York Daily News - 9/27/2020

Timing is everything.

Mayor de Blasio said he hadn’t read about the plight of Donald Speight, a 63-year-old Brooklyn man who died in the coronavirus pandemic after working for decades at a city food stamp office -- and didn’t know Speight asked to work from home but was given permission too late, according to his family.

The mayor also wasn’t aware of the struggles Speight’s two daughters have endured since April while trying in vain to secure their father’s pension benefits.

But when he learned of the grieving family’s predicament, de Blasio said Tuesday the city would follow up "immediately.”

As of Friday afternoon, Speight’s sister Michell said the family had heard zip from the mayor’s office or anyone else in city government.

“It doesn’t take much to call someone or email,” Michell Speight told the Daily News. “It’s disappointing that we haven’t heard back.”

The inaction comes more than a week after de Blasio told reporters that working class “outer-borough” parents of public school kids understand the “realities of life.” Speight, a Navy veteran who lived in Bushwick and worked in a Brooklyn food stamp office, would fit that description.

But his family is not as understanding as de Blasio assumes other outer-borough residents might be. Neither is de Blasio’s former Veterans' Affairs commissioner, Loree Sutton, who called her former boss’s lag in the case “so wrong on so many levels.”

“It’s outrageous,” she said.

Sutton said if the city doesn’t provide the vet’s family with financial restitution and an apology, and hold those involved responsible, she’ll be the first in line to help the family find a lawyer to sue the city.

“There’s no excuse for this kind of leadership failure,” she said.

The Speight family’s sad journey began in March. According to Michell Speight, her brother, who loved his job working for the city’s Human Resources Administration, asked supervisors for permission to work from home because he suffered from lung cancer, which made him more susceptible to COVID-19.

His 19-year-old daughter Alliyah said HRA declined the request at first, then eventually granted it. But his family claims the approval came too late.

According to a city official, Speight was given permission to work from home March 20, and started doing that on March 23. Three days later, he got sick, Michell Speight said.

By March 30, after his temperature climbed for days, he couldn’t remember what year it was and was taken to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, the family said. He died 11 days later.

“It’s a very sad situation,” de Blasio said Tuesday when told of the family’s difficulties. “We immediately have to make sure the family gets what is due to them."

The mayor didn’t specifically address the Speight family’s claims about delays to Speight’s work-from-home request, describing the early days of the COVID-19 crisis as a chaotic time.

“We were all trying in the first days of this crisis to make sense of a lot of complex things,” he said. “The most important thing now is to make sure that family gets the help they deserve, and we’ll follow up on that immediately.”

Aside from the grief of their loss, and their claim about Donald Speight’s work-from-home request, the family is also struggling to access his pension benefits from the New York City Employees' Retirement System so Alliyah and sister Alecia, 27, can continue to pay rent.

Alliyah described progress with NYCERS as glacial because the family needs to document his cause of death. His death certificate doesn’t list it, and the doctor who can certify his cause of death is away from work indefinitely, she said.

The mayor’s unkept promise is a reality of life for the Speight family.

“People don’t always keep what they say,” Alliyah said.

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