NASSAU, BAHAMAS — The sister of a woman believed to have been swept away during the deadly Hurricane Dorian in 2019 said yesterday that the last time she spoke to her then-26-year-old sister was hours before the storm ripped through Abaco.
Dr Mpatrizzia Naclene Gozito testified in an inquest into 34 people presumed dead and reported to police as missing in the days after the storm.
Gozito, who gave her statement via a Zoom call from Malta, told the court she has spent the past two years trying to find answers in search of her sister Rose Marie Lubin.
She said when the storm hit, Lubin, an IT consultant living in Fort Lauderdale at the time, was visiting mother Marie Etienne in The Mudd — a shantytown that was largely wiped out during Dorian.
Gozito recalled that she spoke to her sister on August 31, 2019, and the last thing her sister said was that she was “OK”.
Lubin had been through hurricanes before and did not think Hurricane Dorian was going to be that bad, her sister told the court.
She said Lubin told her she would call her the next day, but did not.
“I never heard from her again,” Gozito said, choking back sobs and tears.
After days of still not hearing from her sister after the storm, she listed Lubin on a Dorian People Search site that had been created and checked the shelters.
But her sister was not in any of them and never returned to work.
Gozito said she also spoke to the Department of Social Services, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), the Bahamas consulate in Florida and police in The Bahamas, but to no avail.
She received no information about Lubin’s whereabouts or what happened to her.
She said she eventually filed a missing person report with police but has not been able to give any DNA samples due to challenges with traveling amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gozito said she is Lubin’s only sibling on her father’s side and she did not have a relationship with her mother.
She maintained that since the storm, she’s heard “absolutely nothing” from her sister.
“I think the water took her and washed her away,” Gozito told the court.
“I think she’s dead.”
Witnesses for 34 people reported to police as having gone missing during the storm have been testifying over the past month, recounting the last time they saw or spoke to their loved ones.
Gozito was the last witness in the first part of the inquest, which is expected to continue at a later date.
Relatives of 17 of the missing people have testified to date.
Coroner Jeanine Weech-Gomez advised that she will issue her formal decision regarding the deaths of those missing people next week Thursday, “declaring most of the persons that have been listed as missing persons as having been missing as a result of the storm”.
This will enable those family members to go to the Registrar General’s Department to obtain a death certificate, she explained.
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