Long decades of ethnic violence, genocide and religious repression in their native Kosovo could not crush the family of Ramadan Kurtaj.
Instead, it took the freakish horror of one moment — a massive tower crane plummeting out of the Manhattan sky.
“How? How can this happen in the United States?” Kurtaj’s heartbroken father, Uka, said yesterday, red-faced and sobbing on the eve of trial for the millionaire crane magnate charged with manslaughter in the East 91st Street crane collapse of 2008.
“Everything, everything about him was beautiful,” the father said of Kurtaj, his youngest son among eight children. “He was our baby. It is like I have a hole in my chest.”
The Kurtaj family have flown in from northern Kosovo to watch James Lomma, head of New York Crane, stand trial in Manhattan Supreme Court for the deaths of Kurtaj, a 27-year-old construction worker, and crane operator Donald Leo.
When a re-welded crack in the crane’s turntable broke apart, the cab and boom hurtled twenty stories earthward, with Leo trapped inside. Kurtaj was unable to scramble out of a construction trench; it took rescuers half an hour to free the dying man from beneath the fallen crane’s giant counterweights.
Lomma insists that the Department of Buildings had inspected and approved the turntable repairs; prosecutors and lawyers for the slain men’s families blast him for doing the repair on the cheap.
“Greed is what brought this crane down,” said lawyer Susan Karten, who represents the family in a civil suit that seeks damages from Lomma and others connected with the construction for Kurtaj’s pain and suffering and his family’s loss of the $3,000 a month in support he sent them.
“He skirted every rule, every procedure, to save money,” Karten said yesterday of Lomma. “He went forward with this even when he was warned by the Chinese company that did the repair that they did not feel confident in being able to do it right.”
Kurtaj was an avid skier and a veteran of the 1998-99 Kosovo War, a conflict that destroyed the family’s sheep and cattle farm.
“After the war, we had nothing, and we had to start again everything,” the father told The Post in his native Albanian. Kurtaj’s cousin, Xhevahire Sinanaj, translated the interview.
“He came here and he started to work, and he started to help me a lot,” the father explained.
Kurtaj’s little sister, Fitore, 21, traveled here with the father, and showed a crumpled envelope that had held the last $3,000 Kurtaj mailed home.
“Love you guys,” the envelope reads in Kurtaj’s handwriting. It was his signature sign-off during his many phone calls home, as well, the sister said. “Te due shun! he would say in Albanian. “I love you guys.”
“He was the happiest one in the family,” the sister told The Post in a tear-filled interview, also speaking through a translator. At weddings back home, Kurtaj was always the one pulling people out of their chairs, telling them, “Valle! Valle!” Dance, dance.
“I miss him so much,” the sister cried.
“Drejtsi!” the grieving dad said, when asked what he hoped to gain from the trial, using the Albanian word for truth. “Drejtsi!” he called again.
“He says, ‘I want the truth,'” explained the cousin. “We are praying that the judge will be fair,” she said of the trial, which at Lomma’s choice will be conducted without a jury, with the Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Daniel Convisor alone rendering a verdict.
“And we pray that there will be a conviction,” the cousin added, “so that this does not ever happen again.”
The deadly 2008 crane collapse. (James Messerschmidt)