Dozens of bodies found in unrefrigerated trucks outside NY funeral home after neighbors complained of foul smell
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK: Police found dozens of bodies placed in unrefrigerated trucks outside a funeral home in Brooklyn on Wednesday, April 29. While some reports put the number of bodies between 40 and 60, others said it was as high as 100.
The discovery was made after officials received calls from neighbors complaining about the smell for weeks.
Two unrefrigerated U-Haul box trucks stacked with the bodies were found outside Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Flatlands after neighbors witnessed body bags being dragged into them in recent days. They also reportedly captured it on their cameras.
Abdul Kamara, 40, who lives nearby, said, “I’ve seen bodies stacked up on top of one another inside the trucks with both doors open. They’ve been storing bodies in the trucks. It’s been going on since the beginning of COVID. These people have passed. This is not the way they should be treated on the way out.”
Another neighbor, named Jay Fredo, 57, added: “For weeks already, there have been trucks constantly outside unloading bodies. You could smell death. Some of them have been dropped. I know it’s a pandemic, but this is crazy. It’s sick.”
John DiPietro, who owns a neighboring property, expressed his sadness over the treatment of the bodies as he told New York Post: “You don’t respect the dead that way. That could have been my father, my brother. You don’t do that to the dead.”
According to reports, the bodies were placed in trucks because the facility was left with no space to keep them inside. The overwhelming surge of fatalities due to the COVID-19 pandemic left the funeral home struggling with the dead bodies.
It's not alone as other New York City funeral homes have struggled as at least 18,000 people have died in the city since late March.
ABC reported that the police found the bodies in various stages of decomposition as the owner of the funeral home claimed its freezer had stopped working. Hence, they were forced to use the unrefrigerated trucks as storage while bodies awaited burial or cremation.
“I saw 15 bodies in the U-Haul box truck stacked upon one another, and more in the other. They stored them right out on the street,” one officer at the scene told the New York Daily News.
While Dr David Penepent, a funeral director who teaches at SUNY Canton and was brought in by the state to help, said: “This funeral home is over-capacitated with human remains and that is true. He got overwhelmed with the number of remains that he had and he didn't know what to do and I'm here to assist him in this operation.”
Meanwhile, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tweeted Wednesday that he was going to “Flatlands right now to investigate this complaint. This is exactly what I spoke about over the weekend regarding the urgent need for reform in the handling of bodies and burial processes. We demand decent treatment of our deceased.”
“We demand decent treatment of our deceased. It was people who walked by who saw some leakage and detected an odor coming from a truck,” he added.
Reports claimed that the state Department of Health, which regulates funeral homes, was called to the scene to find whether the facility was handling bodies appropriately. But it was revealed Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home is not a member of the New York Funeral Directors Association.