Fatal house explosion leaves father to cope with scars of girls

A Fatal Explosion Leaves a Motherless Family to Deal With a Multitude of Scars

By SHARON OTTERMAN
Published: August 26, 2008
It should have been a night without tears for the Alghaithi family. But as usual these days, they did not get much sleep.


First, curly-haired Lina, 3, woke up screaming after a nightmare that someone was following her. Then her older sister, Twka, 5, started crying and scratching at her burn scars. Their father, Rassas Alghaithi, 29, “slept and didn’t sleep” as he shuttled from bed to bed, cradling the children, he said in Arabic on Tuesday.

By the morning, the children were calm and happy for a few hours, running through the living room. Duaa, 6, the eldest, practiced the alphabet with Twka, as Lina, blind, learned her way by sound and touch through their new space.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

After 10 months in a homeless shelter, Mr. Alghaithi (pronounced al-GAY-thee) and his four daughters moved into a light-filled apartment in a two-family home in South Ozone Park on Monday night, sleeping in their own beds for the first time since a gas explosion destroyed their apartment in Harlem in October. The explosion killed the girls’ mother and left them with severe injuries and scars, both mental and physical.
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