18 Days, 20 Lives: New Yorkers Who Didn’t Survive the Cold

Freezing days and nights claimed the lives of a grandmother, a dancer, a dispatcher and a man who lived among a colony of feral cats.

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By Andy Newman ,  Nate Schweber ,  Mihir Zaveri ,  Shayla Colon and Elizabeth A. Harris Visuals by Anna Watts

Feb. 13, 2026

Shortly before dawn on a Saturday, a retired woman in the quiet residential neighborhood of St. Albans, Queens, got up to use the bathroom. She happened to glance out the front window of her house and saw something alarming: a stranger lying face up on the sidewalk.

The temperature was 10 degrees, and the wind chill was five below. The woman called 911. Paramedics arrived quickly, but the man on the ground, Headley Evans, 71, was soon pronounced dead.

That was Jan. 24.

The next two and a half weeks were the coldest stretch that New York City had seen in years. Despite an increasingly frantic campaign by the fledgling administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani to persuade people to shelter indoors, frozen bodies kept turning up across the city.