Children of Satmar cheder honor victim of Jersey City shooting

The children lined the street as the funeral cortege of Miguel Douglas Rodriguez passed by.

JERSEY CITY police work at the scene the day after an hours-long gun battle with two men around a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey. (photo credit: REUTERS)
JERSEY CITY police work at the scene the day after an hours-long gun battle with two men around a kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
The children of the Jersey City Satmar cheder paid their respects to Miguel Douglas Rodriguez on Monday, turning out of the cheder to line the street as his funeral procession passed by.
His funeral cortège passed the cheder in Jersey City on the way to JFK airport, from where Rodriguez's body will be flown to his hometown of Guayaquil, Ecuador for burial, The Yeshiva World has reported.
Rodriguez, 49, was killed in the attack on a Jersey City grocery store last week, which also claimed the lives of Mindel Leah Ferencz, 33, and 24-year-old Moshe Hersh Deutsch. Police detective Joseph Seals was also killed by the assailants before they arrived at the store.
Moshe's cousin, Chaim Deutsch, was saved from the gunmen by Rodriguez moments after the two cousins entered the grocery store: Moshe was killed instantly, but Chaim was wounded and managed to run to the back of the store. Rodriguez, who was already by a rear exit door, held it open for Chaim before being killed himself.
Rodriguez is survived by his wife and their 11-year-old daughter, conceived after the couple experienced ten years of infertility.
In his native Ecuador, Rodriguez worked as a financial manager for an insurance company, Rodriguez’s brother, William Rodríguez Barzola, told The New York Times. However, upon moving to Jersey City with his family, he could not find similar work due to the language barrier, so found work at the kosher store instead, working there six days a week for over a year.
“My husband was a good husband and a good father,” his wife, Martha Friere Rodriguez said earlier this week. She thanked the “Jewish community that learned how to love my husband and was there for him and embraced him.”