Former NYC Social Worker Dies 'Very Lonely Death' From COVID-19

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — Peggy Ndubisi was never one to ask for help no matter how many obstacles life threw at her. To the very end, her family says, she was determined to stand on her own, especially over the past eight years as she survived the streets of New York, having already survived the perils of Hurricane Sandy, which she did sheltered only by the overhang of the women’s bathroom at Fort Greene Park.

Ndubisi died April 24 from the coronavirus at age 59 following a life that included nearly 30 years as a social worker. Her family is now seeking help on behalf of their beloved Peggy, the naturalized citizen who arrived in New York City as a foreign exchange student in Nigeria in 1980 and who made it her life’s work to help others — no matter the hardships she endured herself.

It’s that determination that Ndubisi’s sister, Elizabeth Ndubisi-Ukandu, chooses to remember most about Peggy, whose family could not get to her as she lived out her final days in a nursing home because of the pandemic. Yet as much as Peggy’s family continues to grieve her death, they also feel the irony that lies in the realization that a woman who helped so many was ultimately unable to find assistance herself when she needed it most.

“She died a very lonely death,” Ndubisi-Ukandu told Patch on Sunday. “It’s so heartbreaking for me. This is one of the things I will regret, because if we knew this was going to be her end, she didn’t need to come here (to the United States). I don’t know how she could have helped so many people for so many years and die such a pitiful death. It’s just unbelievable.”

“I just want people to remember her," Ndubisi-Ukandu continued, her voice trailing off, interrupted by tears and emotion.

As friends and neighbors remember Peggy — known by many as Peggy Casby — for her years of living in Brooklyn and Queens, her family has created a GatheringUs memorial fund to help with the cost of cremation and returning Peggy’s returns to Atlanta, where the family hopes to hold a gathering once the pandemic slows down. As of Monday morning, the fundraising effort has raised more than $1,100 of the $7,000 goal. But for now, with her family hindered by the shelter-in-place order and a lack of funding, Peggy’s body remains in a New York morgue, a ward of the city.

It’s a tragic end to a story that started with so much promise, Ndubisi-Ukandu said.

Just four years after arriving in New York, Ndubisi — who graduated from Pace University, later attended Lehman College in the Bronx and worked as a social worker for nearly 30 years — moved into an apartment in Fort Greene, where she lived for 27 years. But starting in 2011, Ndubisi began to experience difficulty, both personally and professionally. As a 2012 Patch story stated, Ndubisi lost everything in an apartment fire that took place in a building that her sister says was once owned by the parents of film director Spike Lee, before she endured subsequent legal battles and the loss of jobs that led eventually to homelessness.

“That was the beginning of the end for Peggy,” her sister said Sunday of the fire that her family maintains was intentionally set. "She got lost in the cracks."

Despite life’s tribulations, Ndubisi did her best to face obstacles — never getting angry, friends said, but instead doing her best to live life the best way she knew how and to continue to improve herself despite her circumstances. But after any documentation of who she was or what she had achieved were lost in the apartment fire, life just continued to get harder for Ndubisi. Without any paperwork or a Social Security card or passport, Ndubisi’s family, said Peggy was unable to find temporary housing in shelters across the city, which forced her to take to the streets and the obstacles that come with that life.

"I just want to get my life back together," Ndubisi told Patch in 2012, while her eyes filled with tears. "But right now, I'm just tired."

Ndubisi’s sister says Peggy eventually lost her ability to speak, a condition that doctors at the facility where she was hospitalized and later in a nursing home couldn't explain. Now, just weeks after her death, her family wants Peggy to be remembered for the way she spent the majority of the time she spent in New York — not for the years that ended up being her last.

While they wait, her sister knows — as she wrote in an online obituary on the GatheringUs page — that Peggy is finally living at perfect peace with the Lord.

“I want people to remember that Peggy was a social worker who helped people and assisted people,” Elizabeth Ndubisi-Ukandu said Sunday. “If anyone would have seen her, they would have said, ‘Oh, she’s just another homeless black lady,’ but I don’t like that moniker on her. This was a responsible, educated young woman who just happened to end up on the wrong end of difficulty who ended up getting kicked out (of her home) because someone needed to make more money.

“If she wasn’t homeless, she would not have died this miserable death.”

This article originally appeared on the Park Slope Patch