“It’s ironic that he then goes away to relax after helping his dad clean up this place and stuff and he dies surfing — you know, what he loved to do,” his mother, Mary Smith, told WCBS 880’s Alex Silverman.
When the storm hit his neighborhood, Smith paddled up to stranded residents with his surfboard. He helped six people get to safety.
WCBS 880 spoke with Dylan two years ago, a few days after his heroism.
“I heard the screams and I thought that people were burning in the houses behind them,” he said in November 2012.
“One by one, we put them on my surfboard and brought them over to the house across the street,” Smith added.
“He saved a lot of people that night with his surfboard,” his mother remembered.
Dylan, who was 23 when he died, made it through the storm, and so did those he helped rescue.
“I knew I was going to make it out of there and so was every single one of them, because I wasn’t going to leave anyone,” he said.
His mother knows that when people pass the street sign and ask who Dylan was, anyone in the neighborhood would be proud to tell them.
