NEW YORK — Twice a week or so, loaded with bodies boxed in pine, a New York City morgue truck passes through a tall chain-link gate and onto a ferry that has no paying passengers. Its destination is Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, where overgrown 19th-century ruins give way to mass graves gouged out by bulldozers and the only pallbearers are jail inmates paid 50 cents an hour.
There, divergent life stories come to the same anonymous end.
No tombstones name the dead in the 101-acre potter's field that holds Leola Dickerson, who worked as one family's housekeeper for 50 years, beloved by three generations for her fried chicken and her kindness. She buried her husband as he had wished, in a family plot back in Alabama. But when she died at 88 in a New York City hospital in 2008, she was the ward of a court-appointed guardian who let her house go into foreclosure and her body go unclaimed at the morgue.
By law, her corpse became city property, to be made available as a cadaver for dissection or embalming practice if a medical school or mortuary class wanted it. Then, like more than a million men, women and children since 1869, she was consigned to a trench on Hart Island.
Several dozen trenches back lies Zarramen Gooden, only 17 when the handlebars of his old bike broke and he hit his throat, severing an artery. He had been popping wheelies near the city homeless shelter in the Bronx where he and four younger siblings lived with their heroin-addicted mother. With no funeral help from child protection authorities, his older sister scraped together $8 to buy the used suit he wore at his wake. But the funeral home swiftly sent him back to the morgue when she could not pay the $6,000 burial fee.
For Milton Weinstein, a married father with a fear of dying alone, there was no burial at all for two years after his death at 67. A typographer in his day, he had worked in advertising for Sears, Roebuck & Co. But he lost his career to technology and his vision to diabetes; his wife's mental problems drove their children away. Though she was at his side when he died in a Bronx nursing home, she had no say over what happened to his remains — and no idea that his body would be used as a cadaver in a medical school and then shoveled into a mass grave on Hart Island.
New York City is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates. Buried by the score in wide, deep pits, the Hart Island dead seem to vanish — and so does any explanation for how they came to be there.
To reclaim their stories from erasure is to confront the unnoticed heartbreak inherent in a great metropolis, in the striving and missed chances of so many lives gone by. But if Hart Island hides individual calamities, it also obscures systemic failings, ones that stack the odds against people too poor, too old or too isolated to defend themselves. In the face of an end-of-life industry that can drain the resources of the most prudent, these people are especially vulnerable.
The New York Times unearthed these cases in an investigation that draws on a database of people buried on the island since 1980. The records make it possible for the first time to trace the lives of the dead, revealing the many paths that led New Yorkers to a common grave.
Matched with other public records, including guardianship proceedings, court dockets and hundreds of pages of unclaimed cadaver records obtained from the city's Office of Chief Medical Examiner under the state's Freedom of Information Law, the database becomes a road map to unlocking Hart Island's secrets.
Under a New York state law rooted in the 1850s and last amended in 2007, next of kin can have as little as 48 hours after a death to claim a body for burial, or 24 hours after notification.
At that point, a body is legally available for use as a cadaver and for burial in a potter's field. Medical schools have the right of first refusal; the bodies they reject are passed to mortuary classes for embalmment training, which is required for a funeral director's license.
With the rise of private body donations, most medical schools no longer claim corpses from the city morgue. Still, the city has offered at least 4,000 bodies to medical or mortuary programs in the past decade; among these, more than 1,877 were selected for use before a belated Hart Island burial, records show.
To leave your kin to the potter's field has long been considered shameful. But Julie Bolcer, a spokeswoman for the city's Office of Chief Medical Examiner, said many people chose not to claim relatives lying in the morgue. The office does not track the numbers, she said, or ask the reasons.
For the big sister of Zarramen Gooden, 17, buried on Hart Island in 1999, the reason still sears: "Did we want him in Potter's field? Hell no! We didn't have the money. I felt so bad knowing that my brother's body was just taken and dumped."
Zarramen was the family clown, the lovable prankster who had known a better life. His father was a good provider, an Army veteran working two jobs as a janitor in Brooklyn, in a hospital and in a bank. But he died when the boy was 7, and the family ended up on welfare and in the drug-ravaged homeless-shelter system. Their mother, Rita Nelson, became addicted to heroin. After Zarramen's freak bicycle accident, he bled to death on the way to the hospital.
When their mother died in 2014, the children came up with $7,000 for her burial in Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island, beside her husband. Only then did they learn that the burial plot had room for one more. Zarramen?
"They told us it was too late," said the older sister, Malondya LaTorre.
The unclaimed dead wait in cold storage, shelved on racks in city morgues. In theory, all who are destined for that last ferry ride are first subject to selection as educational cadavers under the authority of the chief medical examiner.
In practice, of those buried on Hart Island, only a portion — roughly 300 to 600 out of some 1,500 annually — were ever officially offered as anatomical specimens on the weekly or biweekly lists discreetly circulated by the medical examiner's office, citing name, age, race, sex, place and date of death. Fewer still were chosen.
"A lot of cherry picking," said Jason Chiaramonte, a licensed funeral director who for many years handled the acquisition of so-called city bodies for Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. "It's like, 'Hey, Jason, we have 10 people here; we're going to bury them at potter's field next week. If you want to take a look, see if you can use some.'"
"Technically, they're city property," Chiaramonte added, "and technically, they're only loaning them to us."
Religious charities that handle burials have fruitlessly sought access to the names of people lying unclaimed.
"We can't get the morgue lists," complained Amy Koplow, executive director of the Hebrew Free Burial Association, which is dedicated to providing a traditional private interment to any Jew who cannot afford one. "We can't march into Einstein and say: 'Hold that scalpel! That person's Jewish; they belong to us."
So it was that Milton Weinstein, 67, a Brooklyn-born Reform Jew, became one of three bodies from nursing homes that Chiaramonte borrowed from the Bronx morgue on April 28, 2009, for Einstein's use. In a log book at the morgue, Chiaramonte filled out and signed a funeral director's receipt for each. He loaded the bodies on stretchers and trucked them away. It would be at least two years before they were buried.
There are no rules on how long such corpses can be used. The medical examiner's office redacted all cadavers' names from the records it gave The Times under the Freedom of Information Law. But hundreds could be identified anyway, through comparisons of dates and places of death.
"My God — where was his body for 24 months?" Michael Wynston, Weinstein's estranged son, asked when he learned that his father had been buried on Hart Island on April 20, 2011, two years after his death at Bay Park Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in the Bronx.
With bitterness and self-reproach, Wynston sketched the broken arc of his father's life. Widowed in 1970s Brooklyn with a 7-year-old son and a 3-year-old adopted daughter, Weinstein remarried and clung to his second wife, Lynda, then a hospital nurse with a son of her own. Even when her descent into mental illness and abusiveness destroyed the blended family, Wynston said, his father rejected his suggestion of divorce, saying, "I'd rather have this than nothing."
His daughter ran away. His stepson fled the turmoil to live with his own father. Eventually Michael, who last saw his father in 2002, changed his surname to Wynston, partly, he said, "so my father and stepmother wouldn't find me."
To the stepson, Barry Gainsburg, now a lawyer in Florida, Weinstein's fate was part of a larger economic unraveling. "The bottom line is, his industry was taken out by the computer age," he said, referring to Weinstein's career as a typographer. "He was a good guy; he just got crushed by society.
"A diabetic, Weinstein lost his last job, driving for a car service, because of dimming sight. Destitute and ailing, he and his wife entered the nursing home together. When he died there in 2009, they had been residents for at least three years. But the nursing home, which did not respond to repeated inquiries about the case, sent his body to the morgue as unclaimed, and transferred his widow, over her objections, from the Bronx to a nursing home in Brooklyn.
"It's like the nursing home just collects their Medicaid checks, and when they're done, they just throw them in a heap outside," Wynston said.
Eventually, after Lynda Weinstein had been shuffled through a series of nursing homes, a Brooklyn hospital contacted her son: She was undergoing surgery for lung cancer. The stepbrothers learned only then of Milton Weinstein's death. Nobody could tell them where he was buried. Now they realize why: He was still being used as a cadaver.
"It's the guilt and regret that I live with," Wynston said. "I essentially abandoned him."