Updated April 18, 2020
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The English Brothers Funeral Service Home in Brooklyn.
Helayne Seidman
Next-door neighbors strolling by an infamous Brooklyn funeral service house this week were shocked by the sight of bagged bodies piled outside, unrefrigerated and completely view.
” At one point they had 20 bodies outside,” stated a local citizen who lives a block from the English Brothers Funeral Service House in Sheepshead Bay.
” Kids walking by can see them. I was so disgusted that I snuck all the method in one day and saw bodies in bags on gurneys without covers. They’re not refrigerated. I don’t understand if these individuals passed away of coronavirus or not but if they did and the infection is flowing in the air?”
Frank Restivo, 63, who’s owned the mortuary for years and who was implicated however not charged in a body-harvesting scandal in 2005, didn’t flinch when The Post called him Friday.
” I know,” he said, when inquired about the corpses outside. “We have actually got say goodbye to room inside.”
Because of COVID-19, Restivo said that he had 40 bodies packed inside the funeral house Friday and was forced to put the other bodies in the side backyard. Prior to coronavirus, he said, he generally has no more than two or three bodies at one time at the funeral house.
Restivo stated everybody was unprepared for the variety of deaths brought on by the pandemic however blamed hospitals. He stated they are interacting badly, if at all, with funeral directors and households.
” They’re frightening households by informing them they have two days to select up the bodies and if not they will be delivered off to Hart’s Island,” Restivo claimed. “The families ask us to take the bodies– which we want the hospitals might keep a little longer given that they have morgues and refrigeration.
The city charges loved ones $250 to go to Hart’s Island and get the bodies back after they have actually been buried out there.
” It’s trouble,” Restivo said. “People are worrying. I got a lady concerning see me today hysterical. Her liked one is at [a hospital] and they told her he was going to be relocated to Connecticut, that made no sense at all.”
He called a crematorium Friday to arrange for the cremation of four bodies however the earliest date he might get was May19 In the meantime the bodies sit in the unrefrigerated funeral home.
Funeral directors are required to save bodies in proper conditions and to follow their routine infection avoidance and control safety measures, said city Health Department representative Jeffrey Hammond. Mike Lanotte, the executive director and CEO of the New York City State Funeral service Directors Association informed the Post he had actually never ever become aware of a funeral home leaving bodies outside. He said one Queens funeral service house has bought a cooled truck to deal with the coronavirus-related overload of bodies.
” We have no option but to put the bodies outside,” Restivo said. “It’s safe. We have an 8-foot fence and a gate and we lock it.
” I have actually never seen anything like this in 43 years.
Restivo was examined as part of a 2005 probe into a multi-million dollar scheme to sculpt up cadavers for profit by selling body parts to medical schools and the armed force without next-of-kin authorization. The ghoulish, nationwide rip-off involved numerous funeral homes and was masterminded by Michael Mastromarino, a former oral cosmetic surgeon who died in prison of liver cancer in 2013.
The secret harvesting of body parts, primarily leg bones utilized for transplants, netted millions in prospective earnings, police sources stated.
” Once again the English Brothers funeral house is at the center of an outrageous occurrence,” said legal representative Sanford Rubenstein, who submitted civil suits on behalf of relatives of people whose dead bodies were selected apart for revenue, as well as the irate receivers of infected tissue and organs from the remains. Rubenstein stated the English Brothers Funeral service House, one of the defendants, settled for an undefined amount.
