Family shares brush with death after nearly being crushed by falling tree
WABC, VIEWER HANDOUT, BEN KERSTEIN, CNN
By Michelle Charlesworth
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MAPLETON, Brooklyn, New York (WABC) — A family in Brooklyn is sharing their story after their brush with death in Bensonhurst, where a tree suddenly came crashing down behind them.
Just seconds before the tree came down, Shelly, Ben and Michael were talking about how old the tree looked.
“‘Wow! Look at that tree, it’s quite old.’ And as we’re getting under the tree, you start hearing cracking, and I finally got to the other side of the tree and it was down,” Ben Kerstein said.
It happened on Saturday around 4 p.m. Shelly, Ben and Shelly’s brother Michael were on their way to a family gathering.
After the tree fell, video showed the inside of it was hollow, and there was nothing but dust. The top of the tree had been cut off long ago.
“It was an older tree. It was super dead, but enough that if it had landed on us, we would’ve been dead,” Ben Kerstein said.
The tree is gone now. The Parks Department told Eyewitness News that the tree did not belong to the family. It belonged to the owner of a different property.
Ben and his wife, Shelly Kerstein, said it could have been worse.
“I just can’t imagine the thought process if our kids had been a few feet, lagging behind us,” Ben Kerstein said.
His wife says their kids could have been flattened if they were with them.
But knowing all of this in that moment, Ben Kerstein saw cause for celebration, and was caught on camera dancing just seconds after the tree came crashing down.
“There was no other way, God saved us. We had to celebrate you know,” he said.
His wife says she’s not surprised, and that it’s just his instinct.
In the meantime, there was more craziness for Ben and Shelly on Wednesday.
“We got two flats on the expressway, but we’re still dancing,” Ben Kerstein said.
It’s another reminder that we can’t always control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond.
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