Army vet, 94, kicked out of NYC nursing home to make room for migrants
A 94-year-old US Army veteran is blasting his Staten Island assisted living home for kicking him out to make room for migrants — saying it’s “not fair” that he was sent packing.
Frank Tammaro was given less than two months’ notice that he and 53 other seniors would have to move out of Island Shores Residences in March, and had to make other living arrangements.
“I felt horrible,” Tammaro, a lifelong New Yorker, told Fox News. “It’s no joke getting thrown out of a house.”
He then moved into another facility, but after he fell, he and his daughter Barbara Annunziata decided it would be best for him to move in with her and her children.
It was in her care that the family discovered that Island Shores was being converted into migrant housing — and would not reopen as another assisted living facility as they were promised.
“I don’t understand it at all,” Annunziata said. “It’s not fair to anybody.
“These migrants, they’re getting everything. They’re getting everything and I can’t get nothing for [Tammaro],” she said, adding that she has been having trouble getting insurance to pay for a home health aide.
“Meanwhile, [migrants] get everything. And he’s not entitled to anything.”
Tammaro has claimed the deal to turn Island Shores into a migrant housing facility “was done behind closed doors.”
At first, he said, residents were told the senior center would reopen under new management.
In a statement to Fox News, Homes for the Homeless, the new owners of the building, said it intended to sell Island Shores “to focus on its core mission of serving homeless families” and said that the preferred buyer “would be another senior operator.”
Instead, Homes for the Homeless made an agreement in August with City Hall to move migrants into the facility, which is now known as the Midland Beach Migrant Center.
“We didn’t have a chance to actually make any attempt to stop them because there wasn’t enough time,” he said at a September news conference, as 15 asylum-seeking families moved into the building.
Still, Tammaro — who worked for the US Army Signal Corps, a branch of the Army that manages information systems, and served stateside during the Korean War — said he tried to fight back.
“I said, ‘No, no, no, you are not moving me,’” he recounted. “They replied, ‘Yes, yes, yes, we are.’”
“I was satisfied where I was until they threw me out,” Tammaro explained. “But making the best of a bad situation, that’s what we’re doing.”
He said he mostly feels bad for the other former residents of Island Shores, which included seven other veterans.
“I was not in combat,” Tammaro said. “But these boys that went over and went into combat — and now they’re all settled in there with their lives and everything else — and they’re all disrupted, it isn’t fair.”
But Annunziata said she remains angry at how her father was treated.
“They’re worried about the migrants more than they’re worried about the US citizens,” she said.
The Post has reached out to Homes for the Homeless for comment.
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