MACABRE DISCOVERED – Authorities in New York were investigating a Brooklyn funeral home on Thursday, where dozens of decaying corpses stored in trucks were discovered.
2020-05-01T09:09:17.365+02:00 – The drafting of LCI
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The alert was given by passers-by who complained of the foul odor. Dozens of decomposing bodies – up to 60, according to US media – were found Wednesday, April 29, stored in trucks in New York. The rental vehicle and semi-trailer, from which the foul smell escaped, were parked in front of the entrance to the Andrew T. Cleckley funeral directors, located on a large avenue in an outlying area of Brooklyn. Contacted, the New York police went to the scene, said a spokesperson. It was there that she saw the scale of the disaster.
An investigation has been opened to shed light on this case. Police officers were stationed outside the company on Thursday, while employees in protective coveralls stood near a body placed on a stretcher in front of a refrigerated truck. “We will not tolerate this kind of behavior,” said Howard Zucker, head of the New York State health services responsible for regulating these establishments. He stressed that this company had not been the subject of any complaints in the past.
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New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called the discovery a “horrible situation” which is “absolutely unacceptable”. “Funeral directors are private companies, they have an obligation to treat people with dignity (…), I do not know how they can have allowed such a thing to be done”, he added. bodies found in these unrefrigerated trucks.
“We have corpses that we do not know what to do with”
Owner Andrew Cleckley, who faces civil and criminal penalties, told the New York Times that his establishment, like many others, had been overwhelmed by the influx of bodies, and had to place them in trucks, after having filled his morgue with more than 100 corpses. “I had no more room”, he defended himself in the columns of the newspaper. “We have corpses that we do not know what to do with”. The salon could face fines or have its license suspended.
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Since the start of the epidemic, New York, the most affected city in the world with more than 17,000 confirmed or probable deaths from the coronavirus, has had its share of morbid stories, with multiple testimonies from overwhelmed funeral directors and trucks refrigerators visible across town to help manage body buildup.