One braved the rising floodwaters in his Brooklyn apartment apparently to save his beloved dogs.
The other — a father of five — was trapped in the boiler room of the Washington Heights apartment building where he worked.
Both men died Thursday as a violent downpour pummeled the city, swamping the five boroughs under nearly 2 inches of rain within 20 minutes, officials said.
“I don’t understand how he didn’t make it out of there,” Michael Caban said about his friend Aaron Akaberi, who died with one of his pets as rainwater filled his basement apartment on Kingston Ave. and Rutland Road in Prospect Lefferts Gardens Thursday afternoon.
The flood waters filled Akaberi’s basement apartment. Leaves meant for the sewers were found stuck to the ceiling on Friday.
“(He) was a very athletic and fast person. I can’t see him getting sucked down there and drowning,” Caban said, looking down at the basement apartment Friday, the fatal flood waters now receded.
“I’m just confused. I wish somebody could tell me how this happened.”
“They definitely need to do a deeper investigation into this,” he said.
The FDNY had to send in a scuba team to pull Akaberi, 39, out of the apartment after they were called to the scene at about 5 p.m. He died at an area hospital a short time later.
“He looked like what you see in a movie,” his roommate Akiva Shulman told the Daily News Thursday. “He looked like a dead body that had been fished out of the river. His body was covered in leaves.”
The basement apartment “was flooded right up to the first floor, and then three more feet,” Schulman said.
A similar scene played out moments earlier in Manhattan, on W. 175th St. near Broadway in Washington Heights, where Juan Carlos Montoya Hernandez, 43, died in an apartment building boiler room around 4:45 p.m. His cause of death was not clear.
Hernandez — an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — worked in the building as a handyman in exchange for his room in the basement, a friend and multiple tenants said. It was not immediately clear how he ended up in the flooded boiler room.
“It rained really hard yesterday, so there’s a chance that the drain got clogged and the basement started flooding, and he went out there trying to unclog the drain, and probably got electrocuted in the process, you know, because there is electricity down there,” one tenant, who would only identify himself as Lasha, speculated.
“He seemed like a pretty chill guy,” Lasha continued. “(He) did whatever he had to. I’ve always seen him like carrying garbage bags, buckets, renovation stuff, whatever help the super asked him to do.”
“He was the greatest, giving, loving person I’ve ever met in my life, and very humble,” said Marcio Santelli, who lives in the building and has been friends with Hernandez for more than a decade.
Hernandez was a father of five children, according to Santelli. He was known as “Carlito.”
A man who would only identify himself as Jevahn said that Hernandez “always looked out” for him — and was stunned that Thursday’s storm turned fatal.
“It was heavy rain for a little bit, but not like a Katrina,” he said. “That just shows you that the infrastructure in this neighborhood also needs to be looked into.”
As the rain pounded Brooklyn, Akaberi had already exited his basement apartment in the small, three-story building. But he ran back in to rescue his dogs.
“He got one out and went back to rescue the other. He was electrocuted, and then he drowned,” his friend Aymen Kadri, 35, said.
Akaberi had brought out Luna, a 6-month-old mixed cane corso pitbull. He ran back in to grab Yalla, his 8-year-old mastiff, but “he never come back,” his landlord, Kenneth Oates said.
The two died together, friends said. On Friday morning, Yalla’s body remained in the water-logged basement apartment, a harness wrapped around the dog’s body.
“They were the sweetest, kindest dogs you would ever want to meet in your life,” Caban, 39, said about Akaberi’s dogs. “It felt like they were cats. They would get out and walk themselves block after block. Then they would come back and go inside. They wouldn’t bother people.”
Akaberi also did handyman work in his building. “He worked construction, moving, and he walked my two dogs,” Kadri said.
It rained all day Thursday, but the biggest onslaught took place within a 20-minute stretch, city officials said.
As the storm raged, the city’s 311 system received 4,401 calls involving flooded apartments, buildings, streets and highways, clogged sewers, fallen trees and rising waters, a spokeswoman for the Office of Emergency Management said.
More than 800 of the calls were about flooding, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection said on X.
“NYC’s sewer system was built to handle 1.75″/hour but yesterday’s storm brought the equivalent of 6″/hour in some areas,” the agency said. “That’s four times what the system can handle.”
“Our crews worked overnight to respond and are continuing today,” DEP said.
Nearly 40% of the calls, or 1,679, came from Brooklyn. An additional 1,283 calls came from Queens, officials said.
A flash-flood warning was issued for Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx until 5 p.m. Thursday by the National Weather Service as record-breaking rains and gusty winds whipped through the New York City metro area.
Central Park was swamped with 1.8 inches of rain, beating the previous record of 1.64 inches set in 1917, according to the NWS.
LaGuardia Airport was hit with 1.97 inches, smashing the 1955 mark of 1.18 inches. Wind gusts up to 50 mph accompanied the storm, according to the NWS.
The city Office of Emergency Management warned residents to expect sudden bursts of heavy rain, reduced visibility and possible power outages from downed trees or power lines.
Several subway lines were suspended or suffered delays right before rush hour because of the storm, but service returned to normal once the rain subsided, MTA officials said.
Thursday’s deaths were eerily similar to another storm that hit the city in September 2021, where 11 people, including an 84-year-old woman and a 14-month-old boy perished in flooded Queens apartments during an onslaught from Tropical Storm Ida.
At least 10 of those killed in 2021 died in illegally converted basement apartments, city Department of Building residents said at the time.
