By Karen Freifeld
NEW YORK, Nov 1 (Reuters) - The son of a New York City
housing court judge and a civil rights lawyer was among those
killed on Monday by Hurricane Sandy.
Jacob Vogelman, 24, was found along with a companion under a
fallen tree on Ditmas Avenue in Brooklyn, according to Detective
Martin Speechley, a spokesman for the New York Police
Department. His friend, Jessie Streich-Kest, a 24-year-old
special education teacher, also died.
Vogelman is the son of Brooklyn Housing Court Judge Marcia
Sikowitz and former New York City lawyer Lawrence Vogelman, now
president of the New Hampshire Bar Association.
The pair were among at least 38 people in New York City who
officials said died in the powerful storm, which ravaged the
Northeastern United States Monday night.
Lawrence Vogelman said Streich-Kest's father was very ill,
and Streich-Kest called his son, who lived nearby, for emotional
support. They met up and they were walking her dog when the tree
apparently fell on them.
"He died going to help a friend," Vogelman said.
Brooklyn Housing Court Judge Eleanora Ofshtein, a colleague
of Sikowitz, said, "The housing court family is devastated,
everyone who knows her is. We are all very, very sad for her,"
She said almost all the housing court judges in Brooklyn
plan to attend the funeral, scheduled for Friday.
Marcia Sikowitz has been a housing court judge in Brooklyn
since 1998. She is a former staff attorney at Brooklyn Law
School Legal Services for the Elderly and graduated from the
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.
Lawrence Vogelman is a former professor at Cardozo and a
former law partner of Barry Scheck, one of the founders of the
Innocence Project, which works to exonerate the wrongfully
convicted. He co-directed Cardozo's criminal law clinic with
Scheck in the 1980s and early 1990s.
He is now a partner at Nixon, Vogelman, Barry, Slawsky and
Simoneau in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he is president of
the state bar association.
He and Sikowitz also have 23-year-old twin boys. They are
divorced.
A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo,
Jacob Vogelman was studying for his master's degree at Brooklyn
College. He worked as an assistant manager at A.R.T./New York,
an organization that advocates for nonprofit theaters, and as a
stagehand at MGM Grand, according to his LinkedIn page.
(Additional reporting by Jessica Dye)
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