Twenty-five years after the Crown Heights riots broke their families apart, Carmel Cato and Norman Rosenbaum will meet again.
Cato, 63, who lives in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, lost his 7-year-old son Gavin Cato on Aug. 19, 1991, when a Hasidic driver lost control of his car at the intersection of President St. and Utica Ave.
Hours later, just before midnight, Rosenbaum lost his 29-year-old brother Yankel Rosenbaum, who was attacked by a mob of angry black youth and stabbed by a 16-year-old.
The two men — bonded by loss and tragedy — met once before, in 2001.
Then they got together for the first time to commemorate 10 years since the horrific violence that rocked Crown Heights and the city. They’ll meet again to mark 25 years since they lost their loved ones.
Rosenbaum, 58, is flying in from Australia on Monday, he told the Daily News.
“Time has stood still. It’s bizarre. It’s like it was just yesterday,” he said from Melbourne. “There still is a numbness.”
He and Cato haven’t set up a specific date yet, but they definitely plan to meet up, the men said.
“We’re close. He’s a family man. We have an understanding,” Cato told The News. “You hold on to those kinds of people.”
Cato said he still misses his boy Gavin, the eighth of his 10 kids.
“He was special . . . A part of me is missing,’ ” the dad said.
Yosef Lifsh, the driver who hit Gavin, was never charged. He left the country soon after for Israel and never returned.
Gavin’s cousin, Angela, is now 32. She is married with two children, her uncle Carmel Cato said.
For Rosenbaum, who was in his native Australia when his brother died, there was no vindication in the criminal courts for Yankel Rosenbaum’s death.
Lemrick Nelson, who had a blood-stained knife on him when cops arrested him for stabbing Rosenbaum, was acquitted by a jury on Oct. 29, 1992 of all three manslaughter counts against him. On May 14, 2003, Nelson was found guilty of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights in a civil trial. He was sentenced to 10 years but, credited with time served before that trial, he was released in 2004.
Now 41, he lives in New Jersey and has had numerous run-ins with the law in the past decade.
