New York – New York authorities withdrew the license from the Brooklyn funeral home where they found last Wednesday dozens of corpses piled in trucks that did not have a refrigeration system, authorities in the region reported on Friday.
“After an investigation by the State Department of Health, I issued an immediate suspension order to the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn, whose actions were appalling, disrespectful to the families of the deceased, and completely unacceptable,” he said in a statement from New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker.
“Funeral homes have a responsibility to manage their capacity appropriately and provide services in a respectful and competent manner,” said Zucker, who noted that precisely because they understand the difficulties these facilities face during the pandemic, they had previously given orders to Out-of-state funeral directors to help in this difficult time.
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“A crisis is not an excuse for the kind of behavior we have witnessed at the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home,” he added.
The withdrawal of the license comes two days after the New York Police received calls from Brooklyn residents complaining about the bad smell that allegedly came from dozens of bodies stored, in front of a funeral home, in U-Haul chain trucks. Normally rented by the hour for removals.
A call even claimed that “blood was leaking from one of the trucks,” after which agents were sent to the funeral home where staff removed bodies from these moving trucks and then tried to locate them in a refrigerator truck or mobile morgue, the newspaper indicates. digital amNY.
A police source later told ABC News that two uncooled trailers outside the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home contained 50 bodies each.
According to the Police, the bodies were in the rental trucks for more than a week, in a state of decomposition in some cases, which was what caused the bad smell.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called the finding “abominable” and “totally unacceptable” Thursday, but argued that it is an isolated case and that the city is adequately dealing with the large number of deaths from COVID. -19.
“It was a horrible incident, it is inconceivable. I cannot understand how they let this happen,” De Blasio said when asked at a press conference.
According to Johns Hopkins University, the number of deaths in the state from coronavirus exceeds 23,000, with more than 300,000 cases. Some 18,000 of those deaths have been reported in New York City.
New York is the state most affected by the pandemic in the United States, a country that has become the world epicenter of the coronavirus, reporting as of Friday more than 1,070,000 cases and about 64,000 deaths.
