It’s victims helping victims.
Families that lost loved ones when Flight 587 crashed in the Rockaways in 2001 are taking up a collection for residents of the battered shorefront community still struggling to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.
The poignant gesture will raise thousands, not millions. Most donors will be Dominican-Americans of modest means.
But an official of the Committee in Memory of Flight 587 said the contributors aren’t focused on the money.
“We just want to give them something, you understand?” said Belkis Lora, 45, who lost her 44-year-old brother, José. “We want them to know we are with them.”
The two communities bonded after the doomed American Airlines flight to the Dominican Republic went down following takeoff from Kennedy Airport with 260 people aboard. Five others died on the ground.
Lora said people in the Rockaways cleaned the memorial of storm debris after Sandy struck.
Mayor Bloomberg yesterday officiated at the 11th-anniversary memorial service for the victims, five of whom were from the Belle Harbor section of the Rockaways. But for the first time, the event was held at the Holy Spirit Catholic Church in The Bronx, and not at the memorial site itself, because of Sandy.