Dozens of corpses were found in moving trucks near the New York funeral home after neighbors complained about the nauseating smell coming from vehicles that might have stored the corpses for weeks.
Residents of Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood tried to ignore the stench, but on Wednesday police were finally called in to investigate its source, stumbling upon 50 rotting corpses stacked in four uncooled trucks at Andrew T. Cleckley’s funeral home. Some residents told the local media that they had been smelling for weeks.
Police were called to a #Brooklyn neighborhood Wednesday after a #NewYork funeral home overwhelmed by the #coronavirus resorted to storing dozens of bodies in rented trucks, and a passerby complained about the smell. #theafricanpress #covid19 pic.twitter.com/eve7Wfaoai
— The African Press (@TheAfricanPress) April 30, 2020
“They were unloading the bodies. They had bodies all over the floor at the funeral home. They carried them out one by one, dripping blood”, – said a local man at one of the CBS branches in New York, adding that he saw funeral home workers moving the bodies without masks or gloves.
According to Johns Hopkins University, for some time, New York was the city where Covid-19 turned most, with more than 164,000 infections and about 18,000 deaths reported. The health crisis has left an abnormal mark on the city’s mortuaries and funeral homes, many of which are rapidly depleting storage space for bodies. Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has provided refrigerated trucks at mortuaries to deal with the excess mortality rate, some facilities are still struggling to cope with the influx of bodies.
It was the smell that caused someone to dial 911. Cops discovering dozens of bodies on ice in rented trucks outside a Brooklyn funeral home. #SiriusXM115 pic.twitter.com/cKlgCAJzQm
— garybaumgarten (@garybaumgarten) April 30, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 60,000 lives in the U.S., breaking the gloomy mark of one million infections across the country earlier this week. While federal health officials point to a decline in some of the country’s worst hotspots, the outbreak continues to cause thousands of deaths every day, with tens of thousands still being infected every day.