With mom, sister dead, brother files suit in truck blast

Almost a year after his mother and sister were killed in a food-truck explosion in Feltonville, a Lawndale man has filed a lawsuit against two companies connected to the truck.

Uliser Galdamez, of Oxford Avenue near Glenview Street, filed a civil suit in Common Pleas Court against ERI Vending Cart Co. Inc., which installed the truck's kitchen, and U-Haul, which regularly refilled the propane tanks.

The truck was parked on Wyoming Avenue near 3rd Street on July 1 when a burner ignited a buildup of gas that police and Fire Department officials said came from a leaking propane tank and the truck exploded.

Galdamez's mother, Olga Galdamez, 42, and his sister, Jaylin Landaverry, 17, died three weeks later. Eleven other people were injured.

Friends and relatives told the Daily News last year that Landaverry often helped her mother cook; in the truck, they made tacos, churrascos and other traditional Guatemalan dishes. When she wasn't working toward her diploma from Little Flower High School in Hunting Park — Landaverry wanted to be an OB-GYN — she was cooking in the truck, which her mother had opened to follow her dream.

"They worked hard, and they struggled, but they did it joyfully," Carol Dauerbach, who taught theology to Landaverry at Little Flower, told the People Paper last year.