“It was for a moment that I called the babysitter for something and after a few minutes we started looking for him when I couldn’t see him around,” Abida Sultana summed up the tragedy that began with her autistic son missing in the Ikea store in Brooklyn (NYC) and ended with the boy found dead shortly after, drowned in nearby Erie Basin shorelineWednesday night.
Hasbul Nehan (9), an autistic boy who had no ability to speak, was under the care of a nanny and was seen happily jumping with his little sister Miriyamah (6) on the beds inside the tent before disappearing, his family told yesterday. Daily News.
Hasbul loved the ocean and the water.”
“He was playing and the babysitter was with him,” his mother recalled from her home in Bensonhurst hours after her son’s body was found.
Hasbul was reported missing around 10 p.m. Wednesday, police said. But according to his family, 90 minutes had already passed since they gave the alert to the Ikea store.
They say that at 8:30 pm Ikea workers were asked to view surveillance footage from the store to find out where Hasbul had gone, but the managers only allowed the police to see them when they arrived later.
“If the police had investigated the water in time, my son could have been saved.” the mother insists. When officers finally arrived, surveillance footage showed the boy walking out of the store and into the water. NYPD divers recovered his body shortly after 12:30 a.m. Thursday after a frantic search on the boardwalk.
Sultana, Hasbul, their nanny and their two younger sisters went to Red Hook Ikea for the ocean views of the big store on Beard St. “Hasbul loved the ocean and the water”, his heartbroken mother said, cradling the orange sandals her son was wearing the night he died. The policemen who were looking for the boy found one of those shoes on the shore and the other in the water before finding him drowned. At the moment police consider the death to be accidental.
“I didn’t think this tragedy would happen to him,” said Hasbul’s older brother, Dehan Nehan, 16. “I had a lot of fun with him. His autism didn’t matter to us. It was not a burden. We loved him.”
“At IKEA we are devastated by this tragedy,” he said. a spokesperson for the Swedish company it’s a statement. “Our hearts go out to the family at this difficult time.”
In a somewhat similar case, the family of a 14-year-old autistic boy whose body washed up on a Queens beach after running out of school he won $2.7 million in a wrongful death lawsuit against New York City in 2016.
In recent months two young men have been found dead, drowned, after being reported missing while attending the concert hall The Brooklyn Mirage. The city medical examiner has yet to announce an official cause of death for either and the NYPD has not made any connection between the now three cases.
