#More than 1,300 NYC COVID-19 victims in freezers awaiting burial

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Refrigeration trailers backed up to a possible site of body storage units on 39th Street in Brooklyn.
J.C.Rice

A hulking city-owned warehouse behind Brooklyn’s Costco has become a sad weigh station for the remains of more than 1,300 deceased, including many victims of New York’s coronavirus outbreak.

A short distance from where Costco shoppers load their carts with bulk purchases near 39th Street in Sunset Park, hearses roll down the street to retrieve frozen bodies from a storage facility that funeral directors call the “the pier” for its waterfront location.

The city’s specially designed “disaster morgue,” created during the COVID-19 crisis, housed 1,344 remains as of Tuesday, according to a Medical Examiner’s report obtained by The Post.

The tally is down from as many as 2,000 bodies stored at the facility at the peak of the pandemic, one funeral director said.

City officials refused to provide an accounting to The Post of how many bodies were being kept in “long-term storage.”

The bodies remain in limbo while families decide how they want their loved ones buried or come up with the money to pay for funerals. The city said there is no time limit on when they must be removed.

The city said the construction, operations and maintenance costs for the facility were $20 million and it would seek reimbursement from FEMA.

The city devised the unprecedented plan to freeze bodies in April as space ran short at its other morgues, hospitals and funeral homes. Bodies were put in packed refrigerated trucks.

City Councilman Mark Levine raised the possibility in an April tweet of temporarily burying the dead in city parks, something he later said was only a contingency plan.

The de Blasio administration rejected that idea, suggesting Hart Island — the city’s potter’s field — as a temporary interment spot. But photos of mass graves being dug on the island raised an outcry.

The Medical Examiner’s office said the option to freeze the deceased was a way to avoid Hart Island burials, though the island’s graves took in 894 bodies from March 9 to June 26. Some 1,100 were buried on the island in all of last year.

A total of 23,159 New York City residents have perished from the virus, according to the city Department of Health which includes probable COVID-19 cases in its tally.

The disaster morgue, in a complex of several warehouse buildings, is off-limits to the public and well guarded.

Funeral directors must pass several checkpoints to get in, said Doris Amen, director of Jurek Funeral Home in Park Slope. Hearses or service vans approach on lanes marked by traffic cones, passing “row after row after row” of long white refrigerator or freezer units, she said.

They enter a garage by the warehouse, which has a tent inside, and wait behind other funeral directors on line to pick up bodies.

Medical Examiner staff bring out the bodies, wrapped in heavy vinyl bags, on rolling tables. After tags are checked to verify identities of the deceased, they are lifted onto stretchers and loaded into the hearses or vans. More traffic cones mark the exit lanes.

The facility has become invaluable because burial sites are backed up, Amen said. “Cemeteries are giving us two- to three-week wait times.”

Funeral directors generally praised the ME’s office for the set up and how it has handled the crisis.

But preparations for bodies taken from the facility have presented challenges because freezing changes how remains look when thawed.

“You can’t embalm something frozen. You have to defrost it,” said Anthony Cassieri, who runs Brooklyn Funeral Home and Cremation Service in Brownsville.

“The freezer is great for long-term storage, but not when someone wants to have a visitation or an open-casket viewing. It creates a problem.”