Harlem nursing home kept dead body in storage unit for 5 days, suit alleges
A Harlem nursing home allegedly stashed a dead resident’s corpse in a storage area for five days — letting it badly decompose — instead of turning it over to a city morgue, the woman’s daughter claims in a federal suit filed Thursday.
According to the Manhattan federal court suit, Rosa Lee Richardson died at the Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on 138th Street near Malcolm X Boulevard in December 2019.
The nursing home informed Richardson’s daughter, Edna Watkins, about her mom’s death and she told the facility that she’d pre-planned the funeral with a local parlor, Unity Funeral Chapel, the suit says.
Watkins, who planned to drive from her home in Texas to attend her mother’s funeral, asked Unity to start making preparations, but the chapel said it didn’t have the refrigeration space and the nursing home would have to contact a morgue to have the body placed there in the meantime.
Instead, Watkins alleges in the suit, the nursing home never got in touch with the morgue because it was “too much paperwork and too many questions to answer.”
When Watkins and her family arrived at the facility five days after her mother’s death, workers there brought her to a storage unit where they were keeping her mother’s body, the suit alleges.
The body was “badly decomposing in a room with broken gurneys and an air conditioning unit set at 69 degrees,” according to the suit.
The body needed to be cremated and the family was not able to have a proper funeral for her, Watkins says in her suit.
She’s seeking more than $175,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.
The company that runs the nursing home did not immediately respond to request for comment.