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A DJ survived the Brooklyn building collapse: His prized record collection did not
By
Michael Sol Warren
Published Nov 15, 2026 at 5:19 p.m. ET
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Catalina Gonella/Gothamist
By
Michael Sol Warren
Published Nov 15, 2026 at 5:19 p.m. ET
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In the days after last week's deadly building collapse in Brooklyn, TV cameras and photographers captured hundreds of vinyl records scattered in the rubble.
Most, if not all of them, belonged to one man: Omari Jack, an immigrant from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines who has spent 30 years collecting reggae records and performing vinyl DJ sets under the name Roots Outernational at venues like E-K’s Hideaway in East Flatbush.
Jack said he had lived on the top floor of 1321 Flatbush Avenue for around five years. Jack wasn't home when his building crumbled into a neighboring, vacant lot last Wednesday afternoon, killing eight people, including two children, and injuring 18 others. But he lost a lot of his life's work.
His apartment was home to thousands of records, a collection he estimates to have been worth upwards of $100,000.
“I lost tons of records,” he said. “ I literally had one of the rooms as a music room,” Jack said – a space he called his “headquarters.”
“ I had vinyl in my bedroom closet. I had vinyl scattered in the kitchen area,” he said.
In the days since he lost his home, Jack has seen videos of rescue workers carrying some of his record boxes out of the rubble. But he doesn’t know where any of his belongings were sent — or if they were saved at all.
“ Nobody has contacted me from the city for, like, ‘We found some stuff that is still usable.’ I didn't hear anything like that,” Jack said. “And I don't know who to reach out to either.”
Neither City Hall nor FDNY immediately responded to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.
'I was hoping it ain’t my building'
When Jack left his apartment Wednesday morning, he said his mind was on an upcoming set he was scheduled to do on Friday night for Global Medz Radio.
“ I left everything in my bedroom organized for the radio show,” Jack said. “I have my boxes ready. I have everything all done. I took out the clothes that I was going to wear at the show.”
Omari Jack
Courtesy of Omari Jack
Jack was at work when it happened. He said he got a call and rushed home.
“I was hoping it ain't my building,” he said. “ It's rough, man. You know, you, you go to work, you come home and you lose everything.”
He didn’t know any of his neighbors very well. He said that construction in the neighboring lot, where developers were planning to build a nine-story complex, meant his apartment rumbled all the time. “Almost every day, man,” he said.
He’d had his laptop with him that day, along with a hard drive with six terabytes of music on it. Some of his records were being stored with a friend on Long Island.
But everything else — his rare recordings of concerts dating back to the 70s, his books on musicians like Bob Marley and Dennis Brown, his CDs and cassette tapes, his favorite poster of the reggae artist Garnet Silk — was lost when the building went down.
Jack said his sets, which take him from New York to Canada, Barbados and back home in St. Vincent, include records from reggae legends like Johnny Clarke, Garnet Silk, Jacob Miller, Prince Lincoln Thompson and Barry Brown.
One bright spot, he said, was he'd spent much of the week before the collapse backing up the digital version of his collection.
“ Every single day I was just backing up stuff. I don't know if it's intuition was telling me to do this. But I was doing it every day for the past week,” Jack said.
Jack is still living in the hotel that the city placed him in after his home was reduced to rubble. He said he's not sure when he’ll DJ again, and he’s not sure he’ll ever come close to rebuilding what he had.
“ I'm not going to focus on that right now because there's other things to do. It's not possible for me to go back to how I was in terms of all the music I lost,” Jack said. “When the time is right I might collect a little stuff, but that's not my priority.”
For now, Jack is focused on getting his life back together.
A fundraiser show for Jack will be held at E-K’s Hideaway on November 28. And a GoFundMe to help Jack recover from the collapse has been launched by his friend Kelly Uman, a fellow collector and DJ who lives in Montreal.
Omari Jack
Courtesy of Omari Jack
Uman said Jack, like a lot of collectors, didn't have insurance.
“ It's this really hard thing to document and pinpoint. It's not quite as easy to appraise as, like, jewelry,” Uman said. “It definitely is nuanced, and I've yet to hear of anybody who lost their collection get fully reimbursed.”
She added: "He has to start from zero."
Liam Quigley contributed reporting.
Tagged
Brooklyn building collapse
New York City News
politcs
Michael Sol Warren
Michael Sol Warren covers New Jersey for WNYC and Gothamist, and previously reported on issues around the Garden State for NJ Spotlight News and NJ Advance Media. He can be reached at [email protected].
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