These New Yorkers had homes. They died outside in the freezing cold.

WNYC News | Feb 21

Kenneth Luna’s family said he died doing something he enjoyed: walking through the park near his Bronx home to clear his mind.

On Jan. 28, the 29-year-old left the apartment he shared with his mother on Brook Avenue in Mott Haven and walked three blocks to St. Mary’s Park, according to his younger sister Maria Luna. Temperatures in New York City felt like 10 degrees that night, and Maria Luna said she suspected that her brother had been drinking.

Had it not been dangerously cold outside, she said, Kenneth Luna might have made it home alive.

But he had lain somewhere in the park and did not get up. First responders found him the next morning after a passerby called 911, Maria Luna said, and he was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

“He wasn’t homeless,” she told Gothamist on Wednesday. “Maybe there was no one around to help him.”

City Hall officials released Luna’s name on Tuesday as part of a list of 18 deaths in public places during the recent period of frigid weather that first gripped the city on Jan. 19. He is one of the youngest people on the list so far, which includes previously unreported names of several others who were also discovered dead across the city.

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