THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 17
widely associated with the disease. He
wasn’t coughing, and he didn’t have a
fever. He went home anyway, to rest
for a few days. On Monday, March 9th,
his day off, he returned to 860 Grand
Concourse, to consult with a doctor on
the first floor—his “doctor friend,” he
called him. He was feeling worse, and
had developed a cough. Tirado noticed
him wheezing as he passed the door-
man’s post.
While he waited for the doctor, Sa-
nabria called one of his stepdaughters,
Walkiris Cruz-Perez, a nurse at Co-
lumbia-Presbyterian. She was in the
Dominican Republic at the time, get-
ting dental work done, but she was
concerned enough to call him an am-
bulance. “He would never call one for
himself,” she said. “But I made him
promise me one thing. I said to him,
‘Go to Columbia. Go to my hospital.
Don’t go to Lincoln.’” She was re-
ferring to the Bronx hospital where
Sanabria was born, and which he held
in almost superstitiously high esteem.
Lincoln was where he had taken his
mother a week earlier, and where one
of his best friends had died, a few years
before. He’d even considered apply-
ing for a part-time job there as a se-
curity guard.
It took about twenty minutes for
the ambulance to arrive and for the or-
derlies to load him into the back. Not
yet feverish, he insisted—in his usual,
stoic way—that he was feeling just fine.
What was most telling, though, was
the fact that he did not object to being
taken to the hospital; almost compul-
sively protective of others, he was finally
ceding control to someone else, which
struck Walkiris as worrisome. She
talked him through the situation on
FaceTime, as Tirado watched from the
door. It would be the last time anyone
from the building saw Sanabria.
I
n the days after Sanabria’s death, his
former tenants and co-workers stag-
gered between shock and grief. Con-
tributing to the over-all sense of loss
was their collective realization that,
while they each felt close to him, most
of them actually knew little about him.
Montalvo, for instance, was vaguely
aware that Sanabria had served in the
military, yet he never learned any of
the details. One tenant in the build-
ing, a thirty-eight-year-old nurse and
Navy reservist named Frankie Hamil-
ton, knew about Sanabria’s time in the
Navy because they swapped stories
about training at a facility near Throgs
Neck, in the Bronx. But he didn’t know
anything about Sanabria’s family. An-
other tenant told me, “I kept hearing
that he had a daughter who was a nurse,
but also that his daughter was a cop.
Which was it?”
He had two stepdaughters, actu-
ally—a nurse and an N.Y.P.D. officer.
He spoke about each of them con-
stantly, with an unabashed and even
grandiloquent sense of pride. Yet he
shared stories about them in differ-
ent ways to different people. Julia Don-
ahue-Wait, a registered nurse herself,
knew all about Walkiris’s career. But
she would be at work during the day,
when Sanabria’s other stepdaughter,
Waleska, often dropped in to meet
him for lunch. Waleska’s precinct, the
Forty-fourth, includes the stretch of
Grand Concourse where Sanabria
worked. Several times a week, they
went to a deli down the street and ate
in his break room at the building.
“When I didn’t have time, we would
stand at the front door and talk about
my son,” Waleska told me. Their
conversations revolved around three
things, she said: her child, her mother,
and her work. “He loved that I was a
cop. He was always telling me about
things that would happen around the
neighborhood.”
Sanabria, the son of Puerto Rican
parents, grew up near the old Yankee
Stadium, in the Bronx. After high
school, he joined the Navy, where he
served for the next twenty years. Trav-
elling was an obsession of his—in the
service, he spent time in the Philip-
pines and the Bahamas—but he also
loved structure and a sense of routine.
“I used to say to him, ‘Juan, you’re just
weird!’ ” Mimi Roman, his oldest friend,
told me. (The two of them were born
on the same day: August 13, 1967.) “He
had to have everything in order. He’d
always have his way of doing things.”
After he was given a diagnosis of ce-
liac disease, a digestive disorder that
rendered him allergic to gluten, he ad-
justed his diet and stuck to it. “It was
always everything in moderation,”
Roman said.
In his mid-thirties, Sanabria re-
tired from the military and returned
home, finding a job as a janitor at a
local elementary school. The young-
est of four children, he was fanatically
devoted to his parents; he worked
overtime so that they’d have money
to take vacations. In 2003, looking for
an additional source of income, he
began working part time at 860 Grand
Concourse, covering odd shifts and
filling in for the other doormen when
they were sick or on vacation. He was
perfectly suited for a job that rewarded
dependability and charm. Unflag-
gingly serious about work, he also had
a mischievous side, playing practical
jokes and making people laugh. “He
had goals in life,” Roman said. “He
wanted to achieve things. He didn’t
want to ever be stuck. He knew all
about his surroundings. He was up
on things. I used to call him ‘the news’
because he always knew what was
going on.”
He met Raquel Ramos, his partner
of eleven years, at a dominoes game
across the street from his apartment.
She was Dominican, and nine years
his senior; she had two daughters, two
sons, and three grandchildren, whom
Sanabria immediately treated like fam-
ily. I asked Waleska if it took time for
her, her sister, and their children to re-
spond in kind. “Not at all,” she said.
“He was a great guy, and we saw how
much he loved our mother.” When
Waleska got married, he was there,
presiding just as any father would, and
when, in 2014, she got a divorce, he
helped her find and pay for a lawyer.
“He was the only one who helped me
with that,” she said. “He was the type
of man I’d want my son to become.
The type of person I would love for
my nieces to marry.”
He also grew close to Walkiris’s two
daughters, who used to stay with their
grandmother while Walkiris was at
nursing school and, later, at the hos-
pital. Sanabria was almost always there.
After leaving 860 Grand Concourse,
he’d stop off at his apartment to give
his mother dinner, then travel to Wash-
ington Heights to be with the rest of
his family. Walkiris’s younger daugh-
ter, Emeli, who’s now thirteen, came
to expect a text message from him
every day at three-thirty, just as she
