Series: Washington Post Covid-19 Death Profiles
- Austin R. Ramsey
- Jul 15, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 12
As part of my practicum studies at The Washington Post — and a relationship I fostered with the general assignment desk there — I joined a team of reporters telling the unique stories of people the region had lost as a result of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The series chronicled the local tragedies and brought a human element to the numbers we'd grown used to seeing and reading about in the news.
Longtime Miriam's Kitchen Employee Dies of Coronavirus Complications
May 26, 2020
After Darrell Jones was rushed to the hospital in late April with shortness of breath and dizzy spells, his lifelong friend Cedric Hand didn’t think that much of it. Jones, 39, had struggled with chronic bronchitis in the past, Hand said, and his weight had made him prone to occasional bouts of illness. Above all else, Hand said, Jones had taken precautions to protect himself during the pandemic.
But when Hand, also 39, called to check on his friend at the hospital, he received a shock. Jones was on speaker phone with Hand when his doctor walked into the room and issued the diagnosis: covid-19.
“His exact words were: ‘Did you hear what he said?’ ” Hand recalled his friend saying. “I said, ‘Yeah, I heard him . . . I heard him.’”
On April 30, Jones died of complications related to the novel coronavirus. His friends and family remember him as a larger-than-life personality, a devoted new father and a lover of music.
Those closest to Jones knew him as Socks or Fat Socks, an endearing nickname from his youth when he took a local fashion statement a bit too far.
“Back in the day — it was the style in the D.C. metropolitan area — we used to wear slouch socks, but Darrell just went overboard with the style,” Hand said, laughing at the memory. “He would put two or three pairs of slouch socks on. His socks would look so thick and his shoes would look so tight on his feet, so he just got the name Fat Socks.”
Jones and Hand grew up together in Temple Hills, where Hand said his friend garnered a reputation for his honesty, good humor and calm demeanor. As boys, Jones had a natural ability to defuse small neighborhood disagreements and bridge gaps between different groups of friends.
After the two graduated from Potomac High School, Hand went to college in Georgia, but Jones stayed local. He took some trade school classes, but mainly worked odd jobs in the District doing security work. Of all his friends, Hand said he and Jones kept in touch most. It was hard not to, he said. Whenever Hand would come home from school for a break, Jones was one of the first people he would see, and they even looked for jobs together after Hand graduated, just like old times.
Hand landed a job at Miriam’s Kitchen, a homeless services organization in Foggy Bottom. A few years later, he took a job elsewhere, but he liked the environment and recommended Jones for a job there, too. That’s where he found his stride, Hand said. Jones started in 2007 and worked there as a security guard until his death.
Co-workers took to social media after Jones’s death, describing their beloved security guard as a constant, comforting presence.
He was a “kind, hilarious, and gentle person,” according to one post. Miriam’s Kitchen set up a GoFundMe account in Jones’s memory to help cover the funeral costs for his family. It had raised more than $16,000 as of Sunday.
Zo Mitchell, 39, another friend of Jones, said he had a deep passion for go-go music. He performed in suburban Maryland with a band called Raw Potential for several years and made a lasting mark within that community.
The outpouring of support from go-go music lovers and friends of Miriam’s Kitchen included testaments to the humble, respectful spirit that Mitchell said defined his friend.
“Everybody loved him wherever he went,” Mitchell said. “He was that kind of guy.”
Jones’s mother, Carolyn Cousar, buried her son on May 15. He left behind a 5-month-old son and a family shocked and still mourning, she said.
“Darrell was a very caring person,” she said. “He had a good heart. He was my baby.”
An Immigrant of Eastern Europe, Tony Surak Made the Most of His American Dream
July 14, 2020
Anatol “Tony” Surak’s death this month came as a shock to his close friends and family, especially since the 90-year-old resident of a Maryland senior living facility had tested negative for the deadly coronavirus twice.
But Surak, who had been diagnosed with pneumonia-like symptoms before testing positive for covid-19 just days later, died of complications that arose from the virus on June 1 at Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville.
That shock, his family says, has never really worn off.
In addition to taking her uncle’s life, said Alex Hewett, 51, of Baltimore, the coronavirus took from his family the ability to properly mourn.
They said goodbye in a pair of tearful video chats, singing “Amazing Grace” and praying together.
“It was just really sad,” Hewett said. “And then he died, but we couldn’t really say goodbye; you can’t anymore. There was no funeral. He was buried, but no one could really be there.”
It marked an end to the life of an Eastern European immigrant who had made the most of his American Dream, said Tony Surak Jr., his son. The elder Surak had worked for the federal government and took pride in the opportunity it gave him.
He emigrated from war-torn Belarus to a displaced-persons camp in Germany, fleeing Soviet and Nazi occupation during World War II. In 1950, Surak sailed to the United States on the USS General C.C. Ballou as part of a refugee resettlement program in the war’s wake.
His family settled in the South River borough of New Jersey, southwest of Staten Island, a hub for Belarusian immigrants in the postwar years. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1959 with a degree in mechanical engineering and, a year later, married another Eastern European immigrant, Angela Mascicki. The couple remained happily married until Surak’s death more than 60 years later.
Surak worked for a while at the Johns-Manville asbestos manufacturing facility in Manville, N.J., and the Singer sewing machine factory in Elizabeth. But Surak Jr. said his father wanted to leave New Jersey, so he took a job with the Library of Congress and moved his young family south to the nation’s capital.
Tony and Angela Surak rented from a small boardinghouse near the Supreme Court before settling in Gaithersburg, Md. He worked on Capitol Hill most of his life, Surak Jr. said, and made the solemn, early-morning commute every day without complaint.
“He slugged through on the Metro every day, first thing in the morning to work on Capitol Hill,” Surak Jr. said. “He would wear his little American flag pin.”
He had a unique gift for language, his son recalled. He was fluent in multiple languages, including Belarusian, German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and English, and he could translate among them.
It was a useful skill at the Library of Congress, where he was part of a team of language experts reading and cataloguing technical books. He was an analyst in science and technology in the library’s air information division. At the height of the space race, the Library of Congress loaned his skills to NASA as it first put men on the moon in 1969. He would go on to help lead delegations of Russian nuclear scientists in the United States before he retired at 74.
Surak was a devout Catholic. In his free time, he would golf and volunteer with the Boy Scouts.
He was a quiet man, not one to talk about himself and probably scarred somewhat by the trauma in his youth, Surak Jr. mused.
“He was a survivor,” his son said.
He and his wife had been living together in the assisted-living facility for a little more than a year when the coronavirus pandemic struck the region.
Saying goodbye amid a pandemic has tested the family. Surak’s wife, Angela, 80, remains in the assisted-living facility, isolated from her family for her safety. Surak Jr. and his brothers and sister want to mourn with her, he said, but they can’t.
Former Technical Adviser for the CIA Dies After Contracting Coronavirus
July 15, 2020
The last time Warren Whitlock saw his mother face-to-face was March 11. It was the day before her assisted-living facility went on lockdown for the coronavirus.
A preexisting condition of his own kept Whitlock from spending time with her, even as her health declined, he said. Their time apart has been weighing heavily on him ever since, because his mother, Eileen Glover Whitlock, died almost two
months later on May 2 of complications related to the coronavirus. She was 90.
A Black woman born amid the Great Depression in Richmond, Eileen Whitlock was shaped by the segregated South, her son said. She was adopted at a young age and compelled to self-sufficiency very early in life.
It committed her to a life of research and education. She graduated from Virginia Union University in 1950, then from Teachers College, Columbia University, with a master’s degree in psychology. She began a grant-funded project at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute (now the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Presbyterian). She later worked on projects at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens and a drug research facility in Brooklyn.
In 1978, she moved to Alexandria, where she began work as a technical adviser with the Central Intelligence Agency. She was trained as a biochemist, her son said, but, for some time, she worked covertly.
“She told me that she had some contracts that manufactured batteries,” he recalled, laughing. “I didn’t need to know any more than that.”
The elder Whitlock loved to travel. She saw much of the United States and visited Italy, South Africa, China and several other countries. She also gave back to her community, volunteering for the Kennedy Center in Washington, Signature Theatre in Arlington and the Alexandria Police Department.
Warren Whitlock, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Army, said he was proud of his mother. His sister works as a consultant with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Their mother’s service to country and community inspired them, Warren Whitlock said.
“My mother had a very big personality,” he said. “She was a person who was about honor and integrity. She loved the truth.”
She was intent on building a better life for her children, he said.
A researcher and scientist by nature, Warren Whitlock said he now understands that his mother taught him to stay away from drugs in school not by lecturing him, but by fostering curiosity and leaving studies about the effects of drug abuse on adolescents lying around the house.
“She always had a plan,” he said. “She was always pulling the strings in our lives, whether we knew it or not.”
The year Warren Whitlock was born, his mother bought an acre lot of property in Cape Cod. She always had a plan to develop it into a vacation house for the family, he said.
It’s astounding to him, in retrospect, that a single, Black mother raising two children in New York would have had enough foresight to plan vacations decades in the future, but, in death, he said, he’s realizing that was the kind of woman his mother was.
“She planned, she thought things out, she embraced everybody and valued honesty and fairness,” he said. “She’s in everything I am and do now.”