Hundreds of bodies remain in freezer trucks at Brooklyn disaster morgue
City struggling to find relatives of 230 deceased
Hundreds of bodies are still stored in freezer trucks at a disaster morgue set up during New York City’s coronavirus surge in the spring, according to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
Many of the 650 bodies at the disaster morgue on the Brooklyn waterfront are of people whose families can’t be located or can’t afford a proper burial, officials said. The unit tasked with identifying bodies is set up to handle about 20 deaths a day, but during the peak of the pandemic it received as many as 200 a day, Aden Naka, deputy director of forensic investigations, told the Wall Street Journal.
Normally, the deceased would have been buried within a few weeks in a gravesite for the indigent on Hart Island in the Long Island Sound. But as COVID-19 deaths surged in New York in April, with as many as 800 deaths in one day, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged that mass burials in temporary graves wouldn’t take place.