Influencer Elizabeth Eaton Rosenthal, aka New York City’s Green Lady of Brooklyn, has opened up about bumping into Anne Burrell just days before her shocking death on June 17 at 55 years old.
Speaking to the Daily Mail on Monday (June 23), Rosenthal talked about their chance encounter, which Burrell documented on her Instagram page earlier this month. “I don’t know her. I meet a lot of people,” Rosenthal said. “But I am the last photo on her Instagram.”
“She [tagged] the photo of me and her to my Instagram, so then I got all the messages,” she continued. “I know she has passed. I posted a message afterwards for her family on Instagram.”
Rosenthal, a fabric designer known around New York for always wearing the color green, didn’t go into detail regarding what she and the Food Network discussed. However, she said Burrell was “very happy.”
“She said she had been wanting to meet me for so long, and she finally did, so she was very happy,” Rosenthal stated.
Anne Burrell Instagram
The beloved Worst Cooks in America host was found “unconscious and unresponsive” by her husband, Stuart Claxton, at their home in Brooklyn, New York, on Tuesday, June 17. According to a call report, the person who made the phone call worried Burrell had suffered a cardiac arrest.
It was later reported by the New York Times that Burrell was “discovered in the shower unconscious and unresponsive surrounded by approximately (100) assorted pills,” per an internal New York City Police Department document.
Just days before, on June 12, Burrell posted a photo with Rosenthal on her Instagram page. “I ran into [the Green Lady of Brooklyn] in my neighborhood today!” the chef wrote. “I’m not going to lie — I have been keeping an eye out for her.”
“I may or may not have followed her down the street for a minute,” Burrell added. “She is just lovely!!!”
Rosenthal responded to the post, writing, “It was so much fun meeting you 💚 see you again soon in the neighborhood 💚 the only thing I make is coffee and fig preserves from my fig tree 💚 love and hugs. I would like to invite you to my garden and pick figs when they are ready, usually beginning to ripen beginning September, and come and visit the garden on a sunny day anyway.”
After the tragic passing, Rosenthal returned to Burrell’s Instagram page, posting, “Hi Anne. you are such a lovely person just to meet and not knowing you, I just love you and so sorry but come to my garden and visit with all your beauty and love and I will be waiting for you.”