‘Take it very serious’: Blizzard survivor tells leaders to do a better job communicating

It was Dec. 23, 2022, and that morning, the single mother who was a pharmacy technician at Buffalo General Medical Center, went to work.

She knew that a bad storm was coming. Her girls, Jasmyn and Ja’Laya, then 13 and 4, had a snow day from school, but Garmon, an essential worker, had to go to work.

It was raining when she left for work, but by the time she was ready to head back home to Cheektowaga that afternoon, a full-blown blizzard was raging.

Trying to see through the blinding snow, she drove at a crawl, sometimes sticking her head out the window because her wipers couldn’t keep up with the snow.

Then, she couldn’t go any farther. Her car was stuck. There was too much snow.

“Can you help me?” she cried out over and over, hoping someone would hear. Two men stopped and tried to push her car out of the snow but they couldn’t. Garmon called her father and her brother. They were trying everything they could but it was impossible.

“You’re not getting out of this car tonight,” she said to herself.

For 19 hours as the snow piled up and the winds howled around her, she sat alone in her car – until a stranger on a snowmobile who heard about her plight from a Facebook group came to her rescue.

A year later, and with winter upon us, Garmon says she remains shaken by what she survived. She hopes the leaders of Western New York have learned from the tragedies of the Blizzard of 2022 that claimed 47 lives, left hundreds, if not thousands, of people stranded in snowbound vehicles and plunged tens of thousands into darkness and cold over Christmas weekend.

“I sure hope they would look at all the lives that were lost,” Garmon said. She knows she could have been one of those.

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