The nun injured in a Staten Island convent fire was chatty and upbeat enough on Monday to request bedside delivery of vegetable soup — a homemade specialty of the convent’s cook — while she waited to learn whether she will undergo surgery for a broken back, her mother superior told the Post.
“She’s in great pain but better spirits,” Sister Mary William McGovern said of Sister Regina Gegic, who jumped from a second-story window to escape a suspicious blaze that ripped through the St. Joseph Hill Convent before dawn on Saturday.
Gegic, 45, is in intensive care at Staten Island Unviersity Hospital and facing a spinal operation as part of her recovery. “The neurologist is still evaluating [her], trying to decide whether to do the procedure or not,” said McGovern. “Thanks be to God, she can still move her limbs, so we are hopeful for her recovery. But with the spine you never know.”
Investigators have determined the fires that broke out on the convent building’s first and third floors are “definite arson,” with as many as four separate flashpoints, a source said.
A tearful McGovern also provided details about the blaze that ravaged upstairs living quarters and, downstairs, destroyed a ground-floor chapel — in use since 1919 — that served as headquarters for McGovern’s order, the Daughters of Divine Charity
“The vestments are gone. Everything is gone,” said McGovern.
Police officers and firefighters were able to rescue some items from ashes of the chapel’s sacristy. Even so, “This was a terrible loss,” she said. “Not only is the chapel the heart and soul of our convent, that building is the headquarters, or nerve center, of all our ministries throughout the U.S., from here to California.”
She said whoever torched the convent scaled the building using a fire escape while two nuns slept inside.
“They went up the fire escape and they removed an air-conditioning unit, and went through a window on the third floor and lit a fire in a waste basket,” she said. “The other fire was set in the chapel, in the front.”
Yahoo Local News – New York Post
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=15681
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
No comments:
Post a Comment