New York Times Article March 19, 2008
Mainstay at Westchester Train Station Falls on Tracks and Is Killed
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Nance Cohen, the younger daughter of Theresa Fiorentino, said her mother “never missed a day” at the train station’s newsstand. Credit Susan Stava for ’s newsstand. Credit Susan Stava for The New York Times
CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.

— It was a routine that Theresa Fiorentino followed for as long as anyone could remember: seven, perhaps eight steps from the newsstand to the elevator, a downward ride of about five seconds, and a minute or so smoking a cigarette along one of the concrete platforms at the Croton-Harmon train station in Westchester County.

On Tuesday, it was no different, except that Ms. Fiorentino, a blind woman who had run the station’s newsstand concession for more than 40 years, rode a different elevator to the platform because the one she often took was out of service, one of her daughters said.

Whether she stumbled while stepping out of the elevator or became disoriented, no one knows. But at 8:31 a.m., an Amtrak train bound for Pennsylvania Station barreled through the station and struck Ms. Fiorentino, 75, who had fallen onto the tracks, the authorities said.

“I see this train coming close and I hear this bang, but I don’t know what it is,” said her younger daughter, Nance Cohen, who was at the station on Tuesday morning to help her mother at the stand.
Ms. Cohen said she rushed to the top of the stairs that link the station to the platform, and then rushed back to the stand, looking for her mother. Hearing commuters screaming on the platform below, she began to weep.

“Somehow, I knew she was gone,” Ms. Cohen, 49, said in an interview at her mother’s modest ranch house here, less than a mile from the train station.
Dan Brucker, a spokesman for Metro-North, the commuter railroad that serves the station, said surveillance camera images showed Ms. Fiorentino falling off the platform as the train roared through the station. She was not pushed, Mr. Brucker said, and the authorities have discarded the possibility of suicide.

Ms. Fiorentino had operated the newsstand at Croton-Harmon for more than 40 years; she and her first husband, Jerry Marafito, won the concession in 1961 under state and federal laws allowing the visually impaired to operate such stands, Ms. Cohen said.
She said that her father, Mr. Marafito, suffered from retinitis pigmentosa, which caused him to gradually lose his eyesight. Her mother lost her sight after surgery to remove a piece from a steel brush that became lodged in one of her eyes while she was cleaning her home, Ms. Cohen said.

For her parents, Ms. Cohen said, the stand provided an opportunity to keep on working, and to work close to home, after they could no longer see.

Ms. Fiorentino was a fixture at Croton-Harmon, running the newsstand after Mr. Marafito’s death to cancer about 20 years ago and the more recent death of her second husband, Joe Fiorentino, whom she met at a camp for the blind, Ms. Cohen said.
“My mother was determined to keep the store going, even if she had to keep it going on her own,” Ms. Cohen said.

She would get up at 3 a.m. every day and often ride a cab to the train station to get the coffee brewing, the newspapers stacked, the rolls buttered and the rolls of coins ready before her first customers showed up.