A beloved attendant who was fatally struck down in the parking lot of the Staten Island hospital where she worked was just weeks away from retirement, her grieving partner said on Friday.
Kathleen Murphy, 64, who cleaned rooms at Staten Island University Hospital, was struck and killed by a car on Dec. 11 just 500 feet from the hospital entrance near Mason and Seaview Aves. in Dongan Hills just moments before her morning shift was about to start.
Cops on Thursday arrested the driver, Surija Bajro, 67, charging him with failure to yield, police said. Bajro, 67, had just dropped his wife off at the hospital for a procedure and was making a left turn out of the roundabout when he struck Murphy in the crosswalk, cops said.
Murphy’s longtime partner and wife, Kathleen Penachio, 69, said the arrest was a small comfort, but doesn’t ease the pain of losing someone as loving and caring as Murphy was.
“I was happy about the arrest because you have to make an example out of somebody,” Penachio said. “She was 500 feet away from the front door to get into work, 500 feet.”
Penachio said Murphy loved her job and the patients. Still, she was counting the days to her retirement at the end of the year, and to her 65th birthday, which would have fallen on Christmas Day.
“We were moving to Jersey,” Penachio said. “We weren’t in a hurry, but we were going to start looking in the summer. That was both of our dreams, for me to go back to Jersey. She’s very close to my sisters.”
Penachio said Murphy had bought a bicycle that she was looking forward to riding in her retirement. The bike was in the kitchen, and Murphy never got to use it.
Murphy also never got to use her new Medicare card.
“It was a couple days after she passed away,” Penachio said. “I got her Medicare card in the mail. I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, you’ll never get to see this.'”
Penachio said they met 33 years ago after she answered Murphy’s personal ad in The Jersey Journal. The ad read, “If you like romance, dancing, walks, and have an ear for country music… All the possibilities are there. Looking for someone to share the fun things in life.”
Penachio said she didn’t like walking much, but she checked all the other boxes.
They had been together ever since, and got married 13 years ago.
Penachio still carries the newspaper clipping of the ad in her wallet.
“I couldn’t have found a better person, a better partner, a better anything really,” she said. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t ask for a better person. We were both spoiled. We gave everything to each other. Did everything together. Went everywhere together.”
Murphy had a wedding ring, but she didn’t wear it to work because she was constantly washing her hands at the hospital.
“She always left it in her little dish,” Penachio said. “That call — when I got that call, I put that ring right on. Haven’t taken it off since.”
“That call,” she said, came later that morning from Murphy’s sister, Mary Rose, who delivered the awful news.
“She said, ‘Are you sitting?’ I said, ‘I am sitting.’ She said to me, ‘Kathleen was hit by a car,'” Penachio said. “But I could tell in her voice, it was more than just getting hit by a car. So I said, ‘Mary Rose, tell me please what’s going on.’ She said, ‘Kathy was hit by the car, and she didn’t make it.’ That’s what she said to me. And that’s when I kind of lost it. And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘She had too much trauma to the body, so they couldn’t revive her.’ So I broke down…”
It got worse.
“When I had to identify her body, it was, like, I have to get out. I have to get out of the room,” she said. “This is not her. It broke my heart at the funeral. That wasn’t my wife in the casket. I know my wife, the way my wife was. I wanted to actually close the casket, but then I decided not to because her family has the right to see her.”
She said Murphy’s wake was packed with people.
“All her coworkers, and people I never met before,” she said. “Oh, my God… everybody she touched.”
A memorial, which included a sketch of Murphy, was left next to the passenger-pickup roundabout outside the hospital door where she was hit.
“We were fortunate to have you! We love you!” the sketch artist wrote.
Penachio, meanwhile, is holding on to the last time she saw Murphy. They had been eagerly looking forward to decorating the house together for Christmas.
“I saw my wife 6 o’clock that morning when she left for work,” Penachio said. “That’s the last time I saw my wife. Last time. She left me a note because she leaves me a note every single morning. That morning she wrote me, ‘I can’t wait til the weekend so we can get the whole house decorated.’ She never got the chance. So I honored that, and I did it all myself. She put the tree up, though. We decorated it before the weekend. It looked really pretty.”
Penachio said she had some health problems, and that Murphy was taking care of her and the Shih Tzu named Muffin they shared. She said she laid a blanket Murphy slept with across the top of the couch, for Muffin to smell her scent. She said she’s not going to wash it for now.
