‘She was the light in the house’: Family of Jody Byron calls for safer Seventh Avenue

On the night of Oct. 4, 75-year-old Judith “Jody” Byron left her apartment in Sunset Park to walk the family dog, and never made it home.

She was crossing Seventh Avenue at 41st Street, with the walk signal, when the driver of a silver SUV heading north on Seventh ran the red light, struck her and sped away. She was taken to Maimonides Medical Center, where doctors worked on her for nearly two hours before pronouncing her dead. The driver had not yet been apprehended when we went to press.

The corner where she was hit marks the edge of Sunset Park, half a block from the family’s apartment and just a few steps from Café Liebre, where we sat down with Jody’s mourning family.

Her husband, 81-year-old Henry Byron, and their daughter, Tomasina, shared their story with us while Tomasina’s one-year-old daughter, Luna, wandered around the shop, exploring the tables and being scooped up in turn by Tomasina and Henry’s home health aide.

Henry was a drummer who worked at famous clubs in New York, like the Metropol and the Jewel Box Revue, while also learning how to craft leather.

“I had a lot of careers because being a musician, you gotta do other things to make a living,” Henry said. In the 1970s his work in the leather business took him and Jody to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for four years, before moving to Las Vegas, back when the Strip was still “old school,” where Henry was able to secure steady work playing the drums and meet celebrities, from Duke Ellington to Redd Foxx. He remembers it being a lot of fun, but also that the transient nature of the town made it difficult to build lasting friendships. For Jody, it was not a place to stay.

“There was nothing for her there,” said Henry. “She wanted to raise a family and it is not a family town.”

Eventually, they moved back to New York. Jody, a survivor of cervical cancer, was unable to conceive, so the couple decided to adopt. They first met Tomasina when caseworkers dropped her off at their home in Astoria, one month after she was born. It was the late 1980s, during the crack epidemic, and her birth mother struggled with addiction. Tomasina was born with serious health challenges and spent the first weeks of her life in medical care before she could finally be delivered to the couple. For Jody and Henry, it was love at first sight.

“I’ve been with them always and they are my parents,” Tomasina said, but it took over four years to finalize the adoption. Tomasina shared a picture of her parents swinging her out the doors of Kings County Family Court on Jay Street on the happy day. “In any lifetime I could ever have, I would always want to go with them. They just loved me like… I don’t even have the words to describe it. They saved my life.”

While she feels many adoptive parents might not want their kids to associate with the biological parents, when Tomasina was turning 12, Jody and Henry hired a private investigator to locate Tomasina’s birth family as the ultimate Christmas present.

“They said, ‘We found her,’ and I already knew what that meant,” Tomasina recalled. She built a relationship with her birth mother, who died in 2006 at age 47, just five years after they reconnected.

“That was very hard for me, but this is…,” she said, thoughts returning to October’s tragedy and tears interrupting her sentence. “My mom was like my air. We were together always, through thick and thin.”

Throughout Tomasina’s childhood and beyond, Jody made a point of picking up Tomasina’s cousin from Staten Island every weekend, so they could spend time together. Many at Jody’s funeral, which took place on Oct. 8, were Tomasina’s birth family. “They loved my mom, and my mom loved them.”

When Tomasina became pregnant with Luna at age 36, her pregnancy was considered high-risk. She fondly remembers the support Jody gave her during that time.

“She came with me to every single appointment and from the time that she was a tiny little bean to the first movement, the sound of her heartbeat, my mom was just in awe,” Tomasina said. “And I wanted her to come to every appointment because I wanted her to experience that because she could not physically have a baby.”

After Jody, who worked as a word processor, retired, she did a lot of volunteer work through organizations like CASA-NYC and Community Help in Park Slope, but like many first-time parents, Tomasina worried about all that could go wrong and wanted to limit both Luna’s and Jody’s exposure to germs. “So all she did was take care of Luna, every day, and take care of my dad,” said Tomasina, who has taken on all the responsibilities of the family caregiver, a role she sometimes struggles with.

“My mom took care of everything,” she said. Jody handled all the paperwork in addition to daily responsibilities. “She’s not here to tell me this is this and this is that. I’m just trying to figure everything out.”

“You’re doing a great job,” Henry told her softly during the interview.

Worried about her father’s worsening health, Tomasina often turned to her mother for reassurance. Jody would tell her not to worry, that she herself would be there for years to come. Jody’s own parents lived well into their 90s and Tomasina expected to have many more years with her mom.

“She said, ‘I’m always going to be around, Sina, I’m here, I’m okay, I’m healthy. I’m going to be with you and Luna,’” Tomasina said. “And then something like this happens, it just destroys your whole world. There’s no other way to put it.”

For years, in addition to playing music, Henry operated a shoe repair shop in Carroll Gardens and eventually the Fall Cafe, a popular coffee spot on Smith Street where Tomasina enjoyed visiting and sampling the tea. After retiring in his early 70s he continued to have musicians and friends visit him at their Sunset Park co-op, where the family has lived for over 20 years. Jody welcomed everybody who came through the door. “My wife was the type of person who accepted everyone,” he said.

As it became hard for him to get around, and he stayed home more often, Jody would continue making her walks around the neighborhood, a regular at La Placita de Brooklyn supermarket, David’s Deli and VLS Pharmacy. “She loved to support small businesses,” Tomasina said.

It was only after she passed that Henry realized the profound impression Jody had made on the neighborhood.

“I myself never knew how many people in the neighborhood got to know her and they loved her.” Now, he said, people stop him on the street to tell him how Jody gave them advice or looked out for them. “I never realized that she really knew everybody around. She would really get to know people. They miss her and we miss her.”

They were together for 58 years and married for 53. Their wedding anniversary fell three days after Jody was killed.

Tomasina showed us videos of Jody playing the piano and riding on the back of a motorcycle up and down Seventh Avenue.

“She wasn’t your average 75-year-old,” she said. “So when they wrote, ‘A granny got killed,’ she’s not a granny, you know? Yeah, she’s 75 in age. But my mom had spunk, and she was it.”

When she was in her 50s Jody had an 18-hour back surgery at Hospital for Special Surgery, performed by Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei, to correct her scoliosis, an operation that Tomasina said gave her a new lease on life. But in the recovery room Jody’s face and eyes were swollen.

“When I saw her, when she died, I’d seen her like that before, after the surgery,” recalled Tomasina. “Being on your stomach for that long, with the amount of trauma from the surgery, you don’t look the same. It was the scariest thing I had ever seen.”

On the night of her death, Henry was at the hospital recovering from surgery himself, and Tomasina was in Puerto Rico, packing for her return trip. She recounted slowly discovering what happened to her mother, first through a call from a neighbor who said the police had the family’s 16-year-old dog, Sócrates. She worried he had bitten someone. Then she received a call from a police officer who told her about the accident. She feared her mother had broken her leg. Then finally a call from the doctor who said she worked on Jody for two hours.

“What do you mean you worked on her for two hours?” Tomasina asked. “She said, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing more that we could have done.’ I said, ‘Stop right there, what do you mean?’ She said, ‘She’s gone.’”

At the time she was speaking with the doctor, she also had Henry on the line on another phone. Henry found out about his wife’s passing when, in shock, Tomasina repeated the doctor’s words, “She’s gone.”

A friend arrived at the hospital around the same time and Tomasina asked her to show her Jody’s body on FaceTime.

“We go to the airport,” Tomasina recalled. “My boyfriend wanted to drive and I said, no, I needed to drive, because that was the only thing keeping me sane at that moment.”

As she revisited those painful memories, Tomasina’s grief mixed with anger at the driver who did not stop.

“Cars fly through here all the time. She’s not the first and she’s not gonna be the last, unfortunately,” she said. “New York is one of those places, hustle and bustle, you have to get where you’re going. But take a breath and slow down. I mean, where are you really going? I don’t know where the hell that guy was going, but his action in a split second just changed all of us.”

The family described what they see on their block: drivers racing down Seventh Avenue, trying to beat the light at 41st Street. From their apartment they hear engines roaring at night.

In November, Tomasina went before Brooklyn Community Board 7’s general meeting to talk about her mother and ask for changes on the block, passing around a petition calling for speed cameras and speed bumps.

“I can hear her voice, and I know that if she could see me now, she would be happy that I’m trying to be proactive and productive and do something about what’s going on in the neighborhood because of what happened to her,” she said.

The evening of Jody’s death, the mother and daughter shared one final conversation, never hesitating to tell each other how they really felt.

“She said, ‘I miss you so much, I can’t wait to see my girls,’” Tomasina remembered. “I said, ‘I love you mommy, I miss you. I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll pick you up in the morning and we’ll go see dad at the hospital.’”

On the corner, the memorial at Seventh Avenue and 41st Street remains. Tomasina adds flowers regularly. A child’s artwork sits on top of a lantern with candles flickering inside as cars roll past.

“She would light the house up,” Tomasina said. “So our house is pretty dim right now.”

If you would like to support the Byrons’ vision of a safer Seventh Avenue, you can sign their petition here.