Sha'Kyra Aughtry and Joey White — Heard Above the Blizzard (2022)

The blizzard that struck Buffalo on December 23, 2022 was the city's deadliest storm in modern memory: days of hurricane-force gusts, whiteout, and cold that killed more than 40 people in Erie County, many of them in stranded cars or within walking distance of shelter they could not see.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Sha'Kyra Aughtry, a mother of three on Buffalo's West Side, heard something under the wind — a man screaming. Outside, 64-year-old Joey White, a developmentally disabled man beloved at the movie theater where he had worked for decades, was collapsing in the snow. He had wandered from home and become lost in the whiteout. Aughtry's boyfriend, Trent Alls, carried him inside.

White's clothes were frozen to his body; his hands were encased in ice, one fist frozen around a plastic bag she had to cut away. For roughly two days, while 911 lines failed and no emergency vehicle in the city could move, Aughtry warmed him, bathed him, dried his hands with a hair dryer, crushed pain medication into food, and went on Facebook Live begging for help, repeating that she had a man in her house who was not going to die there. On December 26, volunteers in a capable vehicle answered the posts and carried White to Erie County Medical Center. Surgeons amputated nine fingers and half a thumb but he survived; by the family's account, he had been within hours of death. The two remain close; White calls her, and she visits him.

Assessment

Nothing here suspends a law of nature, and we score it accordingly. A woman heard what the storm should have swallowed, on the one block where it mattered, and then refused to let a stranger die for two days. His sister's verdict was that God put Joey in front of Sha'Kyra Aughtry's house. That is the providence reading; the secular reading is identical except for the subject of the sentence. The case is in the catalog because it is the modern providence story in a straightforward form: fully named, fully verified, and carried by an act of attention that dozens of that storm's victims never received.