Leighton Brown, 56, was working overtime when a falling tree killed him during Saturday’s nor’easter.
The NYCHA handyman, known throughout Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Houses as “Mr. Fix-it,” had already put in his regular hours when he returned to help tenants weather the devastating storm. Brown, a devoted maintenance man of more than a decade, died in the knee-high brown rain boots that a neighbor would later spot on his body in the ambulance.
“When I see him in the ambulance, and I looked at the boots, I already knew that it was [Brown],” a resident who identified herself as Ms. Henry said Sunday. “He was a well-known man because he worked in every-f—ing-body’s apartment that’s on this side of the development. Everybody knew Mr. Brown.”
Henry had seen Brown that morning working outside his regular shift, still wearing those distinctive boots as the storm’s winds knocked down several trees across the development. When she heard a tree had fallen on someone, she rushed downstairs and found her worst fears confirmed.
The boots were the giveaway.
Brown’s death came at what should have been a celebratory moment. Tenant Kevin Duran said Brown had recently visited his apartment to change a shower head and confided life-changing news. “He said, ‘Kev, don’t tell anybody yet because I haven’t talked to all my people here,'” Duran recounted. “He said, ‘I just got my transfer approved and I just got my promotion. This is my last week here.’ That’s what he said to me.”
The promotion would have taken Brown away from the tenants he had served for over a decade, the ones who came to depend on his willingness to drop everything — even lunch breaks — to solve their problems.
Robin Howard, 67, described a man who simply could not say no. “He was wonderful. All the tenants of Mr. Brown, he was just like, Mr. Fix-it,” she said. “Even if he was on lunch, you could approach him and say, ‘Wow, such and such is wrong in my apartment.’ And he was like, ‘OK, I’m on lunch, but give me a few minutes and I’ll run by and see what I can do.'”
Howard added: “Everybody, everybody says he’s the best person that they ever had out there.”
Brown’s generosity extended across the development and, for some tenants, into their most personal spaces. He had worked in scores of apartments, leaving behind grateful residents now struggling to process his sudden absence.
The nor’easter that killed Brown felled at least three other trees in the NYCHA development, where crews worked through Sunday to clear debris. But the physical damage paled against the human loss. Tenants gathered to mourn the man who had fixed their showers, tended their apartments, and made himself available in ways that exceeded any job description.
Brown had family in his native Jamaica and a son in Connecticut, who residents expected to arrive Monday. The handyman’s final act of service — working overtime in dangerous weather — fit the pattern of a life defined by showing up when others needed him, even when the cost proved unbearable.