The person
Cellie Muschamp.
December 20, 2021
Fifth Avenue & Union Street, Brooklyn
A mother of two, Cellie spent more than twenty years caring for children. She came from Belize in 1993 and built a life around that care.[1]
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Elegist: Cellie's daughter looked through her mother's phone. More than half the photographs were of the child she was caring for.
Sociologist: Not her own child.
Elegist: No. One of the children whose parents had entrusted them to her. Cellie had been a nanny for more than twenty years. Her own children were twenty-two and twelve.
Sociologist: Paid work, and love. Those aren't opposites. Families build their days around someone who will care for a child as a person, not a task to be completed.
Elegist: She had come from Belize in 1993. Arcellie Marina Muschamp. Cellie to the people who loved her. Her brother talked about all the friends she still had in Belize, people she had known since school.
Sociologist: On December twentieth, 2021, she was crossing at Fifth Avenue and Union Street with a one-year-old boy in a stroller. They had the signal. A pickup driver turned left into their crossing.
Elegist: Cellie pushed the stroller clear. The driver struck her. The little boy survived, unhurt.
Sociologist: She should never have had to save him from a left turn.
Elegist: She died eleven days later. Fifty-two years old.
Sociologist: The child's parents called her their guardian angel.
Elegist: Her daughter wanted justice. A mother who'd filled her phone with pictures of somebody else's child was not coming home to her own.
On December 20, 2021, a pickup driver turned into her crossing at Fifth Avenue and Union Street. Cellie pushed a child’s stroller clear; the child survived. She died eleven days later, aged 52.[2]