When Jonathan Pender didn’t show up to work on Jan. 30, his family started looking for him right away — but it was already too late.
As they would learn 10 days later, around 4:50 a.m. that that day a cyclist found Pender in the snow on a pedestrian walkway of the Manhattan Bridge and called 911, telling cops that Pender “appeared to be having a medical episode,” an NYPD source said.
Medics rushed him to Brooklyn Hospital, where he died about four hours later, the day after his 42nd birthday. The city Medical Examiner’s office later determined Jonathan died of hypothermia with a secondary cause of chronic and acute alcoholism.
“Mostly everybody liked Jonathan,” said his mother Barbara Pender, 63, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “He used to like to make people laugh a lot.”
He was one of 19 people who perished in NYC in the extreme cold between late January and early February, according to City Hall.
Like many of the victims who succumbed to the cold, Jonathan struggled with substance abuse —he had recently started having seizures after years of heavy drinking — and may have had bouts of homelessness.
The day he died the temperature high was only 12 degrees and the city was in an “enhanced code blue,” a state of emergency where outreach workers work overtime to make sure no one is out on the streets in need of shelter. Little is known about many of those who died.
Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News
The city was hit by a snowstorm on Jan. 25, followed by a sustained period of extreme cold. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
When Jonathan didn’t show up to his federal job as a maintenance worker at the Post Office on Ninth Ave. and W. 30th St. in Chelsea on the day he died, Barbara got a call from his boss, who was concerned about his absence.
Barbara had spoken to Jonathan briefly on the phone for his birthday the night before but now he wasn’t picking up his phone.
Two days later, she posted on his Facebook timeline, which was full of birthday wishes: “Everyone is looking for you. Reach out to us.” That day Jonathan’s older brother filed a missing person report.
The family was unsure about Jonathan’s current address — he deflected every time his family asked.
“We would hit him up,” said Jonathan’s brother, who asked not to be named. “I sent him a message, like, ‘Where are you staying at?’ But he wouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t tell us.”
“He was still coming over to my mom’s house every week,” the brother added. “He would come over hang out for a few hours and leave like nothing was wrong,”
Some of Jonathan’s co-workers later told his brother he had turned down offers to stay with them and they suspected he was riding the subways overnight.
Barbara spent the first week of February calling hospitals.
“For some reason, I never called Brooklyn Hospital,” Barbara said. “I forgot all about that hospital.”
People were drawn to Jonathan, his mother said. For several years he worked as a bartender on cruise ships, using his natural charisma to rake in money.
Even when his drinking became problematic, “people still wanted to hang out with him,” Jonathan’s brother said. “He would just be drinking and cracking jokes.”
When he started trying to seriously make it as a stand up comic in his mid-twenties, his siblings were surprised. As a kid, growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, Jonathan was more into art and drawing, inspired by his lifelong love of comic books, especially Superman.
“He always seemed more reserved growing up. He was sensitive. He’s funny. He’s a great artist,” his sister Sharaya said. “I didn’t realize how outspoken he was.”
“He would be in the clubs, comedy clubs doing stand up. He really pursued it,” his brother said. “I was close to him but some stuff I don’t know. As he got older, he just started developing these skills out of nowhere.”
“It wasn’t till the last few years that I really felt like [the drinking] was taking a toll on his health,” Sharaya said. “He said he wanted to stop, he just couldn’t stop.”
When he started having seizures two years ago his health deteriorated rapidly. He stopped always making sense when he spoke and became uncharacteristically stubborn.
“The seizures were really messing with his brain,” his mother said. “He wouldn’t take advice from us anymore.”
Jonathan’s boss even went so far as to secure a spot for him at a rehab facility in Oklahoma, promising him his job would be there when he came back, but Jonathan didn’t want to leave the city.
“He needed help. But I couldn’t force him to go,” said Barbara.
“I don’t understand why they say we can’t force them to go in the hospital because they’re not thinking straight. So to me, they need somebody to think for them. To me that doesn’t make sense.”
Barry Williams/ New York Daily News
In late January and early February, New York faced 13 days of below-freezing temperatures. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)
Eight days after her son’s death, a social worker at Brooklyn Hospital called and told Barbara and Sharaya that Jonathan had been admitted to the hospital and discharged the same day, on Jan. 30. She was seeking his insurance information.
“The call gave me a little hope, because that was the first time we heard about him,” Sharaya said. “We just started creating scenarios for why he didn’t contact us” after he was discharged.
But when a nurse in the coroner’s office called on Feb. 9th and told them Jonathan had been dead for over a week, the bubble of hope burst.
“It was shocking,” Barbara said. “If he was dead, we figured somebody would have called us.”
“That was a blow. To find out he was dead for like 11 days already, because we were searching,”Jonathan’s brother said. “It was just a huge let down. My mother told me that Johnny was gone and there was just a sinking feeling, of nothing I can do about it. There’s no more searching. It’s over.”
Brooklyn Hospital did not return requests for comment.
The string of hypothermia deaths during the blizzard and historic cold stretch brought scrutiny to the new Mamdami administration.
“These deaths are not inevitable,” Council Speaker Julie Menin said at an oversight hearing about the city’s response to the freeze. “They are the result of gaps in outreach, shelter capacity, mental health services and follow-up. Every person who freezes to death in this city is a reminder that systems that are designed to protect human life are failing the people who need them most.”
Several of the victims had previous contact with the shelter system and social services, according to City Hall. At least two were found directly outside of hospitals, including a 54-year-old man found outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell on the Upper East Side and 60-year old Lance Vega, who was discovered outside St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, both around 7 a.m, on Jan. 24.
A third person, Nolberto Jimbo-Niolas, had hospital discharge papers in his pocket when he was found in a park, according to the Ecuadoran consulate.
On Feb. 25, Barbara was finally able to lay her son to rest. At a memorial service attended by about 50 people at Funeraria Juan – John’s Funeral Home in Brownsville, Jonathan’s ashes were displayed in a blue urn emblazoned with Superman’s “S” logo.
A cousin delivered his eulogy.
“Whatever questions we still hold, we know that Jonathan is safe right now, and that his story did not end here on earth,” the cousin told her fellow mourners. “Jonathan is safe. Jonathan is okay. Jonathan is good.”
With Rocco Parascandola