A lifetime of advocacy, all without speaking a word

Ricky Weisenberg, who had cerebral palsy, spent his life trying to help people with physical disabilities. He couldn’t speak, but that never got in his way.

Weisenberg, who was living at the AHRC Nassau group home in Plainview, died on Aug. 7, at age 66, of complications of pneumonia.

Weisenberg was the adopted son of longtime Long Beach resident Harvey Weisenberg, a former police officer, city councilman and state assemblyman, and his late wife, Ellen. Ricky was the main motivation, his father often said, for his decades-long focus on helping those with disabilities, just like his son.

“God gave me an angel, a saint and a mission,” Weisenberg said. “The angel is Ricky, my special child. The saint was my wife, and my mission is to help people. Ricky changed my life.” Ellen Weisenberg died in 2016.

Ricky lived in group homes upstate, in Melville and in Pittsburgh before spending the last 30 years in Plainview. At the AHRC Nassau residential facility home there, his family said, he was once mistreated and abused. As a result, his father introduced Jonathan’s Law in the Assembly in 2007 — named for Jonathan Carey, a child with autism who was killed that year by a care worker — which required the reporting of abuse or neglect of the disabled. Harvey Weisenberg also filed suit against the facility in 2012. The suit was settled the following year, and Weisenberg helped pass legislation in 2013 to restore funding to the state budget for people with physical and developmental disabilities.

It was all because of Ricky.

“The values in this world have changed,” the now 90-year-old Weisenberg said. “It used to be all love and caring, and now it’s anger and violence. Everything in the news is negative, and there’s so many good things. We’ve helped so many people and saved people’s lives, and it’s all Ricky.”

A bench on the Long Beach boardwalk near Grand Boulevard was dedicated to Ricky, and Weisenberg wrote an autobiography titled “For the Love of a Child,” published in 2018, about all the work he has done, in which he made clear the inspiration for it all: Ricky. The book brings light to the many laws Weisenberg helped pass to help those with disabilities.

Harvey’s and Ricky’s lives were also chronicled in a documentary called “The Voice of the Voiceless.” In Ricky’s honor, the film was scheduled to be shown at Malverne Cinema on Thursday. Weisenberg said he hopes it shows the love between them, and how it led to their helping so many others.

“The love you get, the unconditional love you get from a special child is like no love experience you can imagine,” Weisenberg said.

Gutterman’s Funeral Home, in Rockville Centre, hosted a visitation and a funeral for Ricky on Aug. 8 — but as far as his father was concerned, the service was much more than a funeral.

“We celebrated Ricky’s life,” he said. “We didn’t mourn Ricky, and that’s the truth. We celebrated his life, and that’s what it’s all about.”