A Benefit to help 17-year old Gabrielle Squillante and her family will be held on Saturday, Oct. 13 at the Arts Factory on Avenue E and East 24th Street from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Tickets cost $25 each and will be used to help raise funds to purchase lift for the disabled Gabrielle as well as other improvements that would make her home more accessible.
DJ Laurie has agreed to spin CDs for the event and a local band, The Beaters, will headline the live portion.
Posters for the event are being donated by Joe Taggerini and the space is being donated by Art Factory.
“We’re also going to have an auction, said William Archiello, the owner of Archie’s Cab, who has taken a lead in the fundraising effort.
In June, residents responded to a story that appeared in the Bayonne Community News in an effort to pool resources to help provide improvements to the family home to accommodate Gabrielle’s needs
Since birth, Gabrielle has suffered from a rare neuro-genetic disordered named Angelman Syndrome, or more frequently know as “the happy puppet syndrome.”
Gabrielle doesn’t walk or talk. She can’t dress or feed herself, and still wears diapers. Although about to turn 17, she is still at a developmental age of less than two.
Three years ago, the family took out a second mortgage to make changes to the two-family home to better accommodate Gabrielle and her sisters. This included the construction of a deck outside their kitchen with the intention of eventually constructing an elevator. The deck got built, but the elevator was too expensive – as were the needed changes to the bathroom that would allow the parents to more easily bathe their daughter.
Currently, 49-year-old Joe must carry Gabrielle up and down the stairs from the house and lift her in and out of the bath.
Joe said he has already mortgaged the house as much as possible to accommodate his daughter’s needs, including renovations. At one point, he purchased a rail for the front steps that would help get his daughter up and down from the second floor, but that the system wasn’t adequate enough to handle the situation.
“We need a lift of 14 feet,” Joe said. “The system we looked at goes up only 12 feet, and you wind up paying an arm and a leg for additional height. The price triples when you go those extra two feet.”
When first priced several years ago, the family was looking at a cost of about $36,000.
While the elevator for the back deck is the most expensive portion of the renovations needed, Joe said that he also needs to reconstruct the bathroom so that he doesn’t have to lift his daughter in and out of a conventional bathtub.
Because doesn’t fall into the legal wage range that is considered poverty, his daughter is not eligible for many of the state and federal funding programs available for the disabled.
Archiello said previous efforts have raised about $3,000 — $2,000 of which he donated – he hoped the Arts Factory event will help raise enough to bridge the gab between what the family can afford and the cost of the improvements.