Hundreds gather to remember ‘loving’ young construction worker killed in Brooklyn building collapse: ‘He was always smiling’

Detailed summary

“A very loving, very cheerful man — just as you see him in the video. He was always smiling,” his grieving father Luis Siguencia told reporters in Spanish.

One of the construction workers who died in the Brooklyn building collapse was remembered as a “loving, very cheerful man” who was planning to marry the mother of his 3-year-old son during a memorial service in Queens Saturday night.

Around 300 people gathered in Corona to remember Gabriel Siguencia, 22, who was one of three construction workers killed alongside five other people after a three-story building in Brooklyn came crumbling down into an adjacent empty lot Wednesday afternoon.

“A very loving, very cheerful man, just as you see him in the video,” his grieving father Luis Siguencia told reporters in Spanish during the gathering at Alianza Ecuatoriana Internacional — a nonprofit community organization that supports Ecuadorian and Latin American immigrants.

“He was always smiling. He had so much love to give. He had many years of life still ahead of him.”

Siguencia, who lived in the Bronx, came to the US legally less than two years ago from Ecuador where his girlfriend and 3-year-old son remain and had only been working for the construction company for a week before he was killed.

“He was working to save up money, to get married, have his child baptized, and bring them here because he didn’t want them to go through the same process he went through when I came here,” the devastated father said.

“He didn’t want to leave his son behind or have him end up alone, so that’s why he was working.”

The elder Siguencia had only seen his son a day before he was killed and remembers him lovingly telling him not to work the next day because he was feeling unwell.

“He said to me, ‘Dad, take care of yourself — go home and rest. Don’t work tomorrow, you need to look after your health,’” Luis recalled.

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