Courtesy Zeqway Clarke 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. The picture, which he later shared with The Daily Beast, showed at least eight bodies had been left haphazardly on the floor. They were only partly covered by sheets or quilts and appeared to be unclothed. Three of the faces were visible. “Horrified,” Clarke said of his reaction. Zeqway Clarke was attending the funeral of a relative who died of coronavirus when he spotted what looked like a bare foot behind a curtain. Courtesy Zeqway Clarke More 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 He noticed that the usual hearse and men in suits and ties had been replaced by rental trucks and men in work clothes.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.” ‘It’s Never Been Like This’: Coronavirus Deaths Overwhelm New York Funeral Workers The daughters now saw their father’s cellphone photo of what lay just beyond the backdrop behind the coffin. “My daughters said, ‘What?’” Clarke reported. “That’s the first time my children actually seen something like that.” “As a parent you want them to know that’s not right,” he later said. “You want them to know people should be treated with respect.” He noted to himself that there was no air conditioning in the chapel. “Not cool,” he said in more than one sense. “In regular room temperature like that, what’s going to happen?” As he and his family resumed sheltering in place, Clarke considered reporting to the authorities what he had photographed. “[But] there was so much going on with the pandemic, social distancing, I figured it hell or high water to get in contact with somebody,” he recalled. He decided just to post the photographic evidence on Facebook. Some commenters noted that funeral homes were overwhelmed. Most comments were unalloyed outrage. Then came the discovery of the decomposing bodies in the trucks outside the funeral home. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams responded to the scene. He later said that much the same is happening throughout New York as the usual progression from hospital and morgue to funeral parlor to cemetery and crematorium has backed up. “We have an emergency going on right now,” Adams told The Daily Beast. “I’m surprised we don’t have cars stuffed with bodies.” He added, “There is so much more we could do to better move this situation forward.” To that end, he is establishing a Bereavement Task Force that will begin meeting next week. “We’re going to bring people in the room in every aspect of this industry and sit down and hear directly from them what we should be doing to coordinate this operation,” he said. Cleckley hung up twice when The Daily Beast sought comment, the second time suggesting the reporter ask crematories why they are not taking more bodies from funeral directors. Cleckley no doubt was facing problems the death industry could not have imagined before COVID-19 turned the city into the global epicenter. But he could have been more easily forgiven were it not for the photo Clarke blindly took of what was going on behind the backdrop. NYC Is Taking Hundreds of Body Bags Out of Houses—and Soon They Will Be Counted No matter how inundated the funeral home may have been, and no matter how frightened the workers may have been of catching the virus themselves, there is no excuse for just leaving bodies every which way. Only a moment would have been needed to pull a sheet up over a face or cover bare limbs. “I BEEN TELLING Y’ALL ABOUT THIS PLACE AND WHAT THEY DOING,” Clarke declared on Facebook after the Wednesday raid. I’M HAPPY ITS FINALLY ALL OVER THE NEWS!!!!!...😢😢😢RESPECT PEOPLE FAMILY...SAD SAD SAD.” And the photo he blindly took with his upraised phone now teaches us what his daughters learned regarding the importance of simple respect even when overwhelmed at the global epicenter of the pandemic.
武汉43%的人不火化,难道都土葬了?国内不是管的很严不能土葬吗?
火葬提高产能还是更容易吧,8小时工作延长到24小时,就提高三倍,还有共用炉子这些操作。土葬的话,你短时间找到更多土地也不容易啊。
两个民主国家,一个有钱空气甜一个脏乱差,我为什么不选好的这个?以为是厉害国、全世界就一家?
你国内亲戚好友不给你寄口罩?
武汉疫情结束,死亡数据修正以后是4000多人
纽约市疫情正酣,目前死亡数是1万8000
武汉平时就是死亡的人100%火化
纽约平时不到一半的人火化
大瘟疫发生时,击穿火葬场的处理能力很正常对吧?
来不及处理可以理解,因为平时不烧那么多人,车,人手都是按平时的量来配备的。
当时武汉火葬场的帖子里基本都是在分析数据,估算它究竟比平时多烧了多少人,为什么官方死亡数字是小几千,却让火葬场24小时不停烧,临时增派了那么多人手却还是不够用,要从外省调殡仪馆人手。没有人指责武汉的火葬场办事不力。倒是武昌火葬场那个负责人自己在大骂狗官。
Sssssssssss
不要搞人身攻击好不好,我的话得罪你了我先给你道个歉。
我也抱歉,会把刚才的删掉。
我的意思是移民大部分原因是经济,厉害国当然不如美国,但比印度强多了
这个论点其实论证得太多了。美国的强盛靠的正是民主制度,民主制度下创新能力能够得到保障。全世界198个国家绝大多数实行民主政体,发达国家大国无一例外全是民主国家。
这个不是巧合,这个是客观规律。
好的,观点不同没问题,大伙可以心平气和地讨论。谢谢支持
这个倒是和前面选印度还是选美国矛盾了。在美国,印度裔美国人身居高位的多了,为什么他们不留在印度创造价值,强盛印度呢?印度也是民主国家啊?
美国现在这个样子其实并不能说民主制度就不好。的确在应对疫情这种情况下,强有力的集权政府控制起来比较方便,但是以此牺牲的个人代价并不一定就比感染病毒导致的代价更大。
亚洲民主国家韩国日本应对起来也不差,甚至更好,说明如果民众防疫意识强的民主国家控制效果也非常好。
美国应该学习的是韩国,而不是中国。
民主国家五花八门各有不同,民主国家的人民可以自由迁徙,从落后地区跑到发达地区不是很正常的事情吗?
这你就偷换概念了,你的回帖回答的是两个不同的问题。
1)是不是执行民主制度的就一定是发达国家?
2)可以自由迁徙的国家才是民主国家。
对于2,没有任何异议,对于1,前面网友说的更符合逻辑,发达国家都是民主国家,并不能证明只要国家民主了,就一定是发达国家。换言之,民主制度可以是一个国家发达与否的充分条件,但一定不是必要且唯一的条件。
我同意这个,可是不能解释为什么执行民主制度的印度不是发达国家,甚至连区域发达都做不到。所以,还是回到原来的论点,民主制度是国家发达的充分条件之一,但不是必要条件,更不是唯一必要条件。
印度如果实行集权制度,恐怕国力也上不来。因为除了政体,还要考虑人口素质。
黑叔叔搞什么政体都没戏,就是人口素质的问题。
大家把讨论重点放在如何处理, 保存尸体上。 如果殡仪馆人员不够, 就应该上报。 尸体处理一定得有正规程序。我看了电视60分钟, 纽约有专门训练的人员管这个。
是不是说反了 必要条件是指一定得有没有就不行,充分条件是说有了就可以了。你来个充分条件之一,有之一就不是充分了吧。当然我明白你说的意思就是说非民主也有办法成功。观点对不对另外讨论。只是感觉充分之一这个说法别扭。
英国工业革命的时候,英法殖民全球的时候,德国/日本奋起急追/快速工业化的时候。。。都不是今天意义上的民主国家
自由市场?现在的自由市场体制,是二战后由美国主导下才建立的。。
二战前西方各国剥削殖民地,日子爽的很,谁和你自由市场。。
市场需求?英国强行摧毁印度的工业体系,强迫印度买英国的工业品,凭借大炮打开中国市场/倾销鸦片,这就是最大的市场需求
想要资源?抢不就好了?直接把中东变成自己的殖民地,随便搜刮石油不比出钱买来的方便?
一个个历史都那么差吗?
还是被洗脑洗糊涂了?
你也好意思说历史,我们现在说的就是二战后的历史,谁跟你扯一战殖民地时代。
现代民主发达国家的概念是二战以后才确定的。
印度二战前都不是独立国家。
呵呵,不说历史你估计都不记得发达国家当初是怎么发展起来的
和所谓的民主自由有个屁关系
对,印度二战前是被剥削的殖民地。所以二战后独立至今好了那么久的民主社会,他们成发达国家了吗?
那你说个毛
因为你不明白在美国,无论好坏都是透明的,都可以拿出来说,任何的决定,无论对错,都是可以辩论的。比如复工的事,人们可以拿枪去州政府示威,表达自己的看法。所以无论将来发生什么,大家对过程是了解的。你可以把总统换掉,但你不能说总统做的决定不代表人民(至少部份人民)的看法。而中国政府做的任何决定都没有这种合法性,因为谁都不知道这个决定是怎样做出的。
所以美国做的任何事情,无论对错都是可以“洗地”的。