Flatbush mortician fights for license, livelihood after virus scandal
During the deadliest days of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City, the bodies piled up at a Brooklyn funeral home — and the stench that came with it — at an alarming rate.
Passersby reported that the smell was wafting from rental trucks used to store decomposing remains outside Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home, in a working class section of the borough next to a discount variety store.
What happened next, Cleckley says, made him the scapegoat for an unforeseen crisis — hundreds of COVID-19 deaths a day in New York that overwhelmed funeral homes across the city. Authorities swept in and suspended his license in an episode that made headlines in a city already reeling from other horrors of the pandemic.