The immigrant cricket player hit by lightning in Brooklyn Sunday can neither speak nor move the left side of his body but is trying desperately to communicate, his best friend said yesterday.
“[Doctors] say he has a 50-50 chance of survival,” Kenneth Charles said of Patrick Gibson, 41, a construction worker from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, who was struck in Marine Park.
“He hasn’t spoken since it happened,” said Charles, 33. “I wouldn’t say he’s totally unconscious. He tries to move his feet and toes when they ask him.”
A spokesman at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan said Gibson was in critical condition.
Meanwhile, a 22-year-old Newark man also struck during Sunday’s storm succumbed to his injuries.
Isaac Coello-Pineda was hit while seeking shelter under a tree. Three other men with him were injured but survived.
Coello-Pineda was the nation’s 25th lightning fatality this year. The National Weather Service says 80 percent of those struck by bolts are male.