Every week, Michael Cintron lays flowers around the Jacob Riis Houses in the Lower East Side in honor of his late son, Gavin.
Cintron and his wife, Alicia Griggs, are florists. His son was in training to join the business.
But, in 2022, that dream was ripped away. Gavin died of a disease, pulmonary fibrosis, rarely found in someone his age. The 23-year-old slowly descended into the clutches of death as his lungs failed.
Griggs said, “About a year before he died, he was so tired and fatigued.”
“He was peeing in water bottles because he can’t get up to go to the bathroom,” she went on. “And he was losing weight and I’m begging the doctor, ‘what do I do?’”
Griggs’ punctuates the thought with tears, recalling the doctor telling her, “There’s nothing you can do.”
Gavin loved skateboarding and he was close to competing in the Street Skateboarding League, according to Cintron. But, his mystery illness scarred his lungs to the point where the doctor said, “With those lungs, you’re never going to skate again,” Cintron recollected.
“Gavin lost hope at some point,” Griggs added. The last day Gavin would ride his skateboard was March 21, 2022. Cintron remembers the day. He took him to an indoor skatepark in Brooklyn.
“It was cold out and he couldn’t skate outside,” Cintron said, choking on the words. “He was doing tricks and he was trying, but he had to stop for 10 minutes in between his tricks.”
Griggs described Gavin’s breathing “like he was fucking running all day for 12 hours.” He shrunk from 175 lbs, down to 110 and he was so weak she had to bathe him, Griggs said.
After those baths, Griggs recalled Gavin telling her, “I don’t feel good.”
Gavin slowly got worse and worse and so did the scarring on his lungs. No doctor could figure out what was wrong with him.
By July 2022, Gavin was in medical rehab. Then, on Aug. 26 he was admitted to the NYU Langone’s intensive care unit.
Gavin would live only 13 more days, but the last time he spoke to his parents was on Sept. 3. Griggs recalled Gavin calling her on Facetime, before she and Cintron came over to visit him in the hospital. His last words to his mother were: “I love you.” After that, Griggs said it was like he was in a coma.
The Riis Houses were abuzz with the media around that time. NYCHA had contracted with a laboratory to test the development’s water after numerous reports that the water was cloudy. The tests showed Riis’ water had arsenic, above the legal limit. A 51-page report from the Department of Investigation found these to be an error, yet, Riis residents continued to test positive for arsenic, well above safe limits.
Griggs and Cintron pressed NYU Langone to order arsenic tests for Gavin the day he was admitted to NYU Langone. A letter from NYU Langone patient relations specialist Olven Diaz, regarding Gavin’s autopsy, shared with the Village Star-Revue, states that Griggs asked for the tests on Sept. 4, something she categorically denies. She says she asked for them earlier on Aug. 26.
Regardless, NYU did not perform the arsenic tests.
Gavin took his last breath a few days later. His official cause of death was respiratory failure, although doctors insisted Gavin died of smoking-related causes, according to his autopsy which states “the decedent was a known smoker of cigarettes, wraps, and cannabis all of which contain a number of compounds that are known to cause injury to the airways.”
The autopsy also said that “concerns about potential environmental exposures were not known to the attending pathologist at the time of the autopsy examination” which has puzzled Cintron and Griggs, who claim they told all of Gavin’s attending doctors and nurses who over saw Gavin about the arsenic scare at Riis.
NYU Langone told the Village Star-Revue in an email they had “no comment.”
“I came home that night and I started crying,” Cintron remembered Sept. 8. “And I said, ‘what’s the connection? What’s the connection?’”
To this day, Cintron said he “can’t think straight.”
“We fight all the time,” he added. “[Alicia]’s like, ‘it’s your fault because we moved here. He died because of you.”
Griggs is thankful she was in therapy at the time, but both admit their son’s death took a toll on them.
Their living room is decorated with a shrine to Gavin. In the center is his urn. Cintron and Griggs couldn’t get themselves to bury Gavin.
“We didn’t want the memory of a funeral for your child,” Griggs said. “I wanted him with me. I didn’t want him in the ground.”
Hurricane Sandy
The family moved to Riis in 2012 after losing their home in Queens in 2010. Five months after they moved in, Hurricane Sandy hit.
Sandy hit Riis especially hard being so close to the East River. The power was knocked out following Sandy. In place of the grid, NYCHA rented diesel generators from Herc Rentals which ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for six years, in the courtyard of the Riis development.
Cintron said he was wheezing and coughing inhaling the diesel fumes. The generators were so loud Cintron said he couldn’t sleep. He was sick of them, and began dumping water in them to shut them off.
Cintron added they were finally removed in 2019 after Cintron spoke to the President of Herc Rentals and said “you’re going to have a serious lawsuit here. You need to take these machines out of here.”
The Village Star-Revue asked Herc Rentals and NYCHA for comment, but has yet to receive a response.
There had been signs something was wrong at Riis beyond the generators. In 2018, Griggs was diagnosed with a rare skin sarcoma. While her family does have a history of cancer, breast cancer specifically which she got two years later, the sarcoma came out of the oblivion, as far as Griggs knew.
Griggs blamed the “contaminants” present at Riis. While Johns Hopkins says “sarcomas are not known to be associated with specific environmental hazards,” exposure to dioxins, a byproduct of burning fuel and arsenic “may increase the risk of sarcoma.”
Griggs was never medically proven to have developed the sarcoma as a result of dioxin or arsenic exposure, but the number of sick and dead Riis residents, who have had elevated arsenic levels, gives her a feeling it cannot be ignored.
Griggs and Cintron believe the “contaminants” are also to blame for Gavin’s death.
New Beginnings
Cintron and Griggs have met with numerous lawyers, but none have taken their case.
Griggs, walking around their apartment added, “we put money into our apartment and now it’s going to crap because I don’t care anymore.”
After nearly three years of protesting NYCHA, trying to figure out why Gavin died and processing their emotional grief, they are exhausted.
Occasionally, the energy among Riis residents flares up. “Every couple of months something will happen [and the energy] will be back,” Cintron said.
But, it doesn’t sustain.
“You cannot heal in the same environment that’s killing you,” Cintron added. “But, I’m gonna get to the bottom of this, I promise you, and Gavin believes me, he knows because I always figure everything out.”
This is the second of a three part series telling the story of the Jacob Riis Houses in the Lower East Side. See page 4 of the March edition of the Village Star-Revue for the first part. The final part of the series will focus on NYCHA.
