Motorcycle, SUV enthusiats help Flatbush, Brooklyn fire victims

Check out the great work done by the all-women Auto Club Outer Order and other SUV and Auto Clubs for the fire victims of Flatbush, Brooklyn. The event was done at the Brownsville Recreation Center yesterday afternoon. The article is written by Simone Weichselbaum of NY Daily News.

(Dozens were left homeless following deadly fire in Flatbush, Brooklyn.)

Dozens of motorcycle and SUV enthusiasts donated a mountain of clothes, toys, books and food Sunday to the homeless families left with nothing after surviving the Flatbush apartment building blaze.

Mounds of secondhand wardrobes were piled up to the ceiling on a stage inside the Brownsville Recreation Center on Linden Blvd. Center doors will stay open all week for the displaced E. 29th St. residents, organizers said.


"I don't know where to start," sobbed single mother Allona Bristol, 35, as she sifted through a mountain of shirts. Bristol and her twin 18-year-old daughters escaped the Feb. 19 fire, started by a voodoo ceremony gone wrong inside a fourth-floor apartment.

"I lost everything. All the memories of my kids are gone," Bristol cried.

Rhyan Rothwell, 32, a Queens NYPD officer and member of the all-women's SUV club Outer Order, put out the call to help after reading survivors' heartbreaking tales in the Daily News.

"I was a fire victim when I was 9 in Washington, D.C. We moved to Brooklyn to live with my grandmother. I became a New Yorker because of a fire. We have to help each other," Rothwell said.