This Is How Horribly They’re Treating the Dead in Brooklyn
Zeqway Clarke was in the back pew in the upstairs chapel at the Andrew D. Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn when he chanced to gaze under the coffin and see what looked like a bare foot.
“You could see it,” he later told The Daily Beast. “You could actually look under the casket and see it. I asked somebody else, ‘Is that a foot?’”
Clarke was there on April 9 with his wife and daughters and a small number of relatives in masks and gloves, bidding farewell to her grandfather, 88 year-old Francois Jules. The pastor continued conducting the service as Clarke gazed at what was indeed a bare foot visible beneath the hem of the cloth backdrop closing off the front of the room.
At the end of the service, Clarke went up for a final parting moment with Jules, a military veteran and retired graveyard security guard, who was recovering from a stroke in Kings County Hospital when he was fatally struck by COVID-19. Clarke used the moment by the coffin to raise his cellphone above the cord on which the backdrop hung.
“I stuck the phone up and took a picture,” the 39-year-old entrepreneur recalled.
He did not see the result until he returned to his seat and checked his phone.
“It was just bodies, bodies on the floor, people on top of each other,” he said.
Twenty days later, the whole city was horrified when police responded to complaints of a foul odor coming from two trucks parked in front of this same funeral home. They discovered dozens of bodies decomposing inside.
The owner, 41-year-old Andrew Cleckley, told police that he had been unable to get cemeteries and crematories to accept enough bodies to keep his facility from overflowing.
“I am out of space,” he was quoted telling
The New York Times. “Bodies are coming out of our ears.”
Clarke lives in the neighborhood, and he had walked past the funeral home with his daughters, aged 15 and 16, as the pandemic was intensifying. He noticed that the usual hearse and men in suits and ties had been replaced by rental trucks and men in work clothes.
“It looked like they just picked up some winos off the street: ‘Yo, we’ll give you some money,’” Clarke recalled. “I said to my kids, ‘It looks like they're bringing these bodies in U-Haul trucks.’ It looked like they were bringing in more and more bodies and the place is not even that big.”
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