A funeral home in Brooklyn was caught storing dozens of dead bodies on the floor of their building, and stacked in piles in unrefrigerated U-Haul box trucks outside. As the coronavirus persists, impacting New York City at alarmingly high rates, it appears some facilities are resorting to inhumane measures to cope with the extra fatalities. On Wednesday, cops responded to neighbours' complaints of a foul odour coming from the property of Andrew Cleckley Funeral Services in Flatlands. Officers were shocked to discover that between 40 to 60 corpses had been stacked on top of one another in U-Haul trucks outside the facility and on the floor of the building.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams believes the city needs to establish a “bereavement committee” in order to deal with the surge in deaths as a result of the coronavirus. “We need to bring in funeral directors, morgues, [medical examiners], clergies," Adams said. "When you find bodies in trucks like this throughout our city, treating them in an undignified manner, that’s unacceptable.” Along with using the two U-Haul trucks to store corpses, law enforcement said the facility were also using two refrigerated trucks to store bodies, and a third box truck in their possession was full of empty caskets. The bodies were reportedly supposed to be picked up by a crematorium but their staff never showed up. According to an anonymous official, after the funeral home's freezer stopped functioning, they began storing the bodies in trucks.
“You don’t see this all over the city — especially in a residential neighbourhood,” one officer noted. “Never seen anything like this.”
