Lost on Hart Island
Last spring, Jacqueline
Quiroz gave birth to her son, Elijah Romero, a stillborn, at Flushing
Hospital in Queens. The 31-year-old mother of a toddler had steeled
herself for this devastating news. She and her husband knew the baby had
died in utero, in her seventh month of pregnancy.
Still,
she lay alone and crying in her hospital bed immediately after the
birth, consumed with shock and grief. Quiroz looked around at the light
green walls of the spacious hospital room, wondering how this could have
happened to her.
“It
felt like a nightmare,” Quiroz said later of her time in the hospital.
As a steady stream of tears poured down her face, she tried to remain
calm when a nurse came in to check on her. “I just didn’t want to break
down,” she remembered. Quiroz asked to see her baby, to hold him just
once.
Less than an
hour after the delivery, a hospital social worker entered her room. She
told Quiroz she had two options for her baby’s burial: one was a
Catholic service in a special cemetery. Quiroz said she was not
Catholic. The social worker reassured her that the city would “take care
of the burial” at a potter’s field, at no cost. Quiroz was a Medicaid
patient, recently unemployed, so the offer was welcome. She was too
distraught to ask any questions.
“I
had no idea what potter’s field was,” Quiroz remembered later, “and I
didn’t ask because I was so overwhelmed with everything. I just thought
it was another burial process and I didn’t know what it would be.”
Minutes later, she signed a form releasing her son’s body to the city.
Unintentionally,
Quiroz had instantly sent her son’s remains on a path to a place where
the city’s forgotten and unclaimed are buried with almost no chance that
their loved ones would find them again. Within a month, Elijah would be
on Hart Island.Quiroz
has been searching for Elijah’s grave ever since.
Just off the coast of
City Island in the Bronx, where the Long Island Sound meets the open
Atlantic Ocean, Hart Island is the final home to more than 850,000 of
New York City’s dead.
The island is one mile long and a quarter-mile wide. There
are sprawling fields, overgrown with weeds and trees near the
shoreline. Most prominent of all is the island’s 45acre graveyard, which
has nearly doubled in size to areas once occupied by institutions built
on Hart Island in the 20th century. The last institution to leave Hart
Island was Phoenix House in 1977.
Since
1869, Hart Island has been New York City’s public cemetery, also known
as a potter’s field. It is the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world
and has undergone several incarnations over the years.
The city’s Department
of Correction runs public burials on Hart Island, and has done so since
the New York City administrative code designated it the department’s
responsibility more than 150 years ago.
Five
days a week at 8 o’clock in the morning, about 30 inmates are bussed in
from Riker’s Island and board a ferry at a pier on Fordham Street on
City Island, the only one of the day bound for Hart Island. Along with a
few Correction officers and the driver of the morgue truck, these men
are often the only people allowed to set foot on the island. To all
other people, including many loved ones of the dead buried there, Hart
Island is virtually off limits. The city considers it the Department of
Correction’s property. Trespassing carries a punishment of up to two
years in prison.
Once
the inmates reach Hart Island, they start a long day’s work that
includes digging trenches for mass graves where they will bury the dead.
The bodies are transported in pine boxes marked in black permanent
marker, sometimes with a name, but usually just a number is used to
identify the person inside. Inmates stack the boxes three deep in a
trench just 36 inches below the surface, burying 150 to 162 adults and
1,000 babies per grave. The plot is then covered with dirt and the
inmates place two-by-fours next to each stack to ensure the boxes don’t
slide around or slip away in bad weather. Each trench is marked with
what those who work on the island call a “monument.” It is a single
wooden or plastic stake in the ground.
The
bodies of those buried on the island are usually either unclaimed or
unidentified. And in a few cases, their families opted to send them to
Hart Island because they could not afford a private burial.
Sometimes however, these families are like the Quirozes. Their
loved ones have names, and they long to visit them. They often have no
idea where they are sending the bodies, and often never find out.
This
is especially the case with the city’s stillborn babies. Each year
there are about 660 stillborns buried beneath Hart Island’s sprawling
fields. This is one-third of all yearly burials on the island.
Jacqueline
Quiroz had no idea of the island’s existence, let alone the fact that
her son would end up there with hundreds of other babies to be buried by
prisoners.
“I
found out through the news,” Quiroz said. The root of Quiroz’s confusion
about Elijah’s final resting place can be traced back to her first
visit to Flushing Hospital in Queens.
In
the fall of 2008, Quiroz and her husband Steve were excited about the
prospect of adding to their family. They were living in a modest house
in Flushing with their 2-year-old son, Jacob. As the Quirozes prepared
for the baby, they learned in the seventh month of Jacqueline’s
pregnancy that something was terribly wrong.
On
a routine visit to the doctor, Quiroz learned that liquid was forming
around the baby’s heart, brain and lungs, a condition called Hydrop
Fetalis.
After an agonizing waiting period, Quiroz was given a grim prognosis that left her and her husband with a difficult decision.
“They
really didn’t know how to treat it,” Quiroz said of the baby’s
condition. “They gave me two options. I could deliver the baby then at
six months or wait until seven or eight months when the baby had a
better chance of surviving.”
Quiroz
and her husband decided to wait. Over the next month, she was at the
hospital every other day for a sonogram. Then, at seven months, Quiroz
went in for a sonogram that showed her baby’s heart was no longer
beating.
When she
speaks of Elijah, Quiroz’s dark brown eyes fill with tears. She drops
her head of curly, highlighted blond hair into her hands and needs a
moment to regain her composure. Her voice gets very soft and one can
hear hints of her Colombian accent peppered throughout her speech.
According
to Quiroz, shortly after the stillbirth of her son, she was approached
by a social worker who identified herself as a public advocate from the
hospital. She spoke to
Quiroz alone, without her husband or anyone else present, and told Quiroz about her two options for Elijah’s burial.
Quiroz
asked the social worker to come back when her husband could be there
and explain all of her options again. She did, but Quiroz still didn’t
have all the information. The hospital worker made no mention to Quiroz
of the burial assistance option.
According
to the city’s Burial Unit, the families of all New York City residents
who die here are eligible to receive $900 in burial assistance funds
from the city if funeral costs do not exceed $1,700. Family members just
need to bring a death certificate and a receipt from a funeral home to
25 Chapel Street in Brooklyn, Room 606, within 60 days of the death and
they will receive the funds. This also applies to stillborn babies.
In
Room 606, Austin Harley works as a coordinator for the city’s Burial
Unit. He said that despite his department’s efforts to get the word out
about burial assistance, people are still vastly unaware of its
existence.
“We
try and do what we can to get it out there about the service,” he said.
“City agencies know about us, and we’re in the funeral homes. We try to
get the information in hospitals, but they move their information
around a lot and they don’t always mention it to families.”
“They
didn’t say anything about it,” Quiroz said when asked about burial
assistance. “I would have really wanted that so we could have a
funeral.”
Instead,
Quiroz decided on a city burial. Having just delivered a baby, Quiroz
didn’t think to ask questions. She was given little information about
where Elijah would be buried and signed a form that didn’t explain much
about this either. All the form said was that Quiroz was appointing an
agent who would control the disposition of her son’s remains.
“I
had no idea about anything,” she said. “I thought I’ll get some type of
paper that tells me the baby’s buried here, you can go visit.”
It took a couple of weeks for Quiroz to start questioning exactly where Elijah’s remains were going to be buried.
When
she called the hospital, the social worker told her to call back in a
few days to get information regarding her baby’s burial records. When
Quiroz did, the woman told her it would take a little more time. Then,
the information stopped coming altogether. So Quiroz started
investigating.
She
went on the Internet to research where New York City’s potter’s field
was and was shocked when she found out about Hart Island.
“When
I found out I was like, ‘Oh no, what have I done?’” Quiroz said. She
was distraught and overcome with regret about the implications of her
decision.
By then it had been over a month since Elijah’s birth, and she still didn’t have any information regarding his burial location.
When
she went back to the social worker for her case to try and stop her
baby’s city burial, Qurioz was told it was too late. Her son was already
on his way to Hart Island.
New York artist
Melinda Hunt has dedicated her life to helping relatives find their
deceased family members on Hart Island. She has stored and catalogued
more than 50,000 records of everyone buried on Hart Island since the
mid-1980s on her personal computer. Hunt received the records after
making one of the largest Freedom of Information Act requests in Hart
Island’s history two years ago, and has been building a database of the
burials ever since.
The Hart Island Project,
as Hunt calls her work, is designed to reunite family members with the
remains buried on Hart Island. Most people usually have no idea of the
whereabouts of the bodies before discovering Hunt’s work.
She
became interested in the island in 1991 when she visited with
photographer Joel Sternfeld to take photographs and document the burials
of the city’s unclaimed dead. Back then, the island was accessible to
researchers but not family members. Hunt gained access through her
faculty position at the State University of New York at Purchase.
Since
the early ’90s, Hunt has written a book and directed a documentary on
the island, all in an effort to raise awareness about the possibility
that people’s loved ones might be buried there.
According
to Hunt, Quiroz’s case is one of thousands where mothers have been kept
in the dark about the details of a city burial for their stillborn
babies.
“There’s
really no policy,” Hunt said regarding the amount of information a
hospital must give mothers about city burials on the island. “It can
take years for them to find out.”
Once
mothers do find out the location of their stillborns, there is
virtually nothing left for them to do but wait and hope for a chance to
visit Hart Island, as the city has a policy that it does not disinter
babies buried there.
Hunt said that these mothers feel a sense of shame for having released their babies to the city for burials by inmates.
“This community doesn’t get organized because they are ashamed,” she said. “They feel like they have let their relatives down.”
Hunt
believes that city and hospital workers give mothers as little
information as possible on burial options because they think mothers
will want to forget about the horrible ordeal of having a stillborn
baby.
“It’s easy
for them to carelessly handle the burial information because they don’t
think mothers will want to remember,” she said.
According
to mental health experts, however, this is hardly the reality in
dealing with the emotions and aftermath of having a stillborn baby.
With
almost no chance of getting their babies back, mothers face a daunting
challenge in trying to arrange a visit to the island. The Department of
Correction requires mothers to provide a certificate of fetal death and
proof that they are related to the baby. Obtaining the certificate is a
process that Hunt says can take months, something Quiroz knows
firsthand.
After
leaving the hospital, Quiroz received no information about how to obtain
a certificate of fetal death. She went on the Internet and found out
that she would have to apply for the certificate with the Department of
Health.
When she
called the department, Quiroz was met with animosity. So Quiroz went
down to the department’s office in Lower Manhattan and applied in
person. She was told the certificate would take up to six weeks to get
to her. Six weeks turned into six months of waiting for her son’s
certificate, despite Quiroz’s numerous attempts to reach city officials
to find out the status of her request. By late December, Quiroz was
frustrated and felt hopeless about ever receiving her son’s death
certificate.
“I
don’t know what to do,” she said one frigid day last winter over coffee
in Midtown, on a short break from taking Jacob to see Santa Claus at
Macy’s, the family’s holiday tradition. “I don’t know if I should keep
going there. It’s very hard.”
Department
of Health spokeswoman Zoe Tobin would not comment on obtaining a
certificate of fetal death and could not find anyone in the department
with knowledge of the process. The city took half a year to process
Quiroz’s request. Finally, just before Christmas, she received the
certificate in the mail. Another woman hoping to visit Hart Island made
it past the months of hurdles at the Department of Health only to find
more barriers at the Department of Correction.
In
August of 1990, Vanessa Wiley gave birth to a stillborn baby at
Metropolitan Hospital. She was a teenager back then and, like Quiroz,
didn’t fully understand the hospital spokesperson’s discussion with her
about burial options.
“The
hospital said they would take care of it,” Wiley remembered. “I was
young and didn’t know what to do and the hospital just took the baby.”
Because
she didn’t have any other burial options or the means to pay for them,
her son had a city burial. This would be something Wiley, who currently
lives with her family on Long Island, wouldn’t fully comprehend until
nearly two decades later, when she started searching for her son’s final
resting place.
First she had to spend months, like Quiroz, trying to obtain a certificate of fetal death.
When it finally arrived, however, she realized it had no signature.
Next,
Wiley went to the Department of Correction, where she got the
run-around for nearly a year. She was put in touch with Stephen Morello,
deputy commissioner of the Department of Correction, who in turn let
her know about Jaroslaw Zysk, a Correction officer in charge of burials
and scheduling closure visits to Hart Island.
According
to Wiley and Zysk’s email correspondence, the Correction officer
initially gave Wiley the wrong information about scheduling times and
did not provide a fax number where she could send him the documents
proving her eligibility to visit the island. Finally, after months of
logistical speed bumps, Zysk delivered another devastating blow. He told
Wiley that she would not be allowed to visit the actual location of her
son’s grave, only a statue of an Episcopal Cross that is nowhere near
the site at which current burials take place.
Wiley
was furious and felt Zysk and others at the department had
intentionally misled her. She couldn’t believe she would not be allowed
anywhere remotely close to her son.
“I
want to go to my son’s actual gravesite and I don’t want to go through
the emotions just to see a statue,” Wiley said. “It is unacceptable.”
But
according to Department of Correction policy, the statue is as close as
anyone who is not working on the island can get to the burial sites
without the risk of getting arrested.
Officer
Zysk, who has recently been reassigned from Hart Island, said that
Deputy Commissioner Morello is the only person who makes decisions about
whom to allow onto Hart Island for a visit. Zysk called the
department’s policy to only allow families to a designated spot far from
the actual burials a safety issue. Among the safety concerns Zysk cited
as possible risks to families are the inmates performing the burials
and that the dilapidated buildings on the island that might fall down.
He said that because of these factors, the department doesn’t let people
go to their loved ones’ actual gravesites, even if they know the
precise location of the grave on the island.
“I
have had no luck on the visit solely because they agreed to take me
there but not to my son’s burial site,” Wiley said. “I don’t see why I
would go there, touch land, and never see my son’s spot. It’s
ridiculous.”
Melinda Hunt keeps records of dead babies collected from hospitals.
Though Wiley is frustrated with the process of visiting her son on Hart Island,
she is comforted by the fact that she knows exactly where her son is
buried. Others are not even that fortunate.
In
the spring of 2008, Melinda Hunt was granted her Freedom of Information
Act request for all burial records on the island from the past 20
years. She received more than 50,000 records and began cataloging them
in an attempt to help families find out if their loved ones are buried
on the island.
NEARLY TWO years
into this process, Hunt has found numerous improbable errors in the
records. Some people are listed as buried decades after their death.
Others are listed as dead before they were born.
According
to one prisoner who was on the island at the time one of the missing
trenches was left out of the records, the department wasn’t very
concerned with the organization of the burials or its record-keeping
practices.
Karel Fort served time at Riker’s in the early 1990s for burglary and drug charges.
After
studying art history in Prague and Vienna, Fort moved to New York where
he played punk music at CBGBs in the late 1980s. He soon got caught up
in heroin and cocaine and had to steal to support his habit.
“I went wild for a while,” Fort said. Then in June of 1989, he landed himself in Riker’s Island for six months.
Shortly
after arriving at the prison, Fort heard about an inmate work program
on another island where prisoners could work outside. He and other
inmates signed up knowing few details about the duties they would have
to perform.
When he got to Hart Island, Fort was happy to be there at first and cherished being outdoors and away from prison life.
“There were no fences, no nothing,” Fort said. “Just the stars.”
Later,
as the work began, Fort and other prisoners quickly sobered up. They
learned they’d be burying the dead in mass graves, spending hours each
day in a trench stacking multiple bodies in wooden boxes.
For
many prisoners, the smell in the trenches got to them the most. An
overwhelming stench of decaying human bodies filled the trenches;
sometimes a person had been dead for months before he or she reached the
prisoners.
Even more disturbing for Fort was the act of burying babies.
“The boxes were not longer than two feet,” Fort said, “And we knew it was a small child in there. It was so sad.”
Fort
noticed the nonchalance of the Correction officers overseeing the
process. He said he would do five to eight burials a day and the guards
wouldn’t ask him about the numbers or locations of the bodies he’d
buried.
Hunt
suspects there will be many more inaccurate and missing records once she
sorts through all 50,000 she has now. Over the years, the Department of
Correction has acknowledged certain instances of lost burial records,
twice due to fire and vandalism when the records, now at the city’s
public archives, were kept at a rehabilitation center on the island.
When
family members hear about the chaotic records and uncaring officials,
they feel the search for the bodies of those they lost may be hopeless.
Especially since the graves may no longer be intact.
According
to retired Correction officer Patrick Walsh, the city would frequently
reuse trenches where boxes and bodies had deteriorated in the ground and
were easily moveable after 25 years.
“It
was a rough chore,” Walsh said of the disinterments he supervised on
Hart Island in the 1960s and ’70s. He was in his mid-twenties and
working as a custodian at Riker’s and as a vacation relief Correction
officer when he was assigned to Hart Island. With no training or
information about the work there, Walsh was essentially filling in for
other Correction officers when they couldn’t come to work.
“It
was a hard time for the inmates,” Walsh remembered. “I was learning as I
was standing there. Everybody knew what they had to do and they did
it.”
Still, at times both Walsh and the inmates found the island a welcome change when compared to the confines of Riker’s Island.
“It
was so quiet and so peaceful,” Walsh reflected. “And the water lapping
up on the shore, that’s all you would hear. Just to be off the prison
grounds at the beach was something they had never experienced before
coming from the inner city, and it was calm and tranquil. I don’t ever
remember a prisoner getting out of line.”
Walsh
said he witnessed hundreds of burials, many of which were stillborn
babies. He estimated there were about 30 babies per week, many more than
the adult bodies that were coming in at the time.
“It
was quite a lot compared to the adults,” he said, adding that he tried
not to pay too much attention when a baby’s coffin was delivered to the
island. “I didn’t take that much notice because I didn’t want to know
what was in there. I knew it was a baby, but I didn’t want to know.”
During
his eight years of work on the island, Walsh said he sometimes was
ordered to disinter entire trenches. But instead of the usual
disinterment process of removing the bodies to be placed in zinc-lined
coffins that were waiting above the ground with inmates, Walsh was told
to push whatever
Inmates
are often hired to bury babies on Hart Island was left of the graves
over to one side of the trench. Then, the burials would start over in
the same trench.
“They
would bring in a bulldozer and collect whatever was left and put it
into the end of another burial plot, which they were just going to cover
over,” Walsh said. “In the spring time they would make a new plot, they
would have the prisoners collect all the bones, you know, rib cages,
legs, there wasn’t much left, and place those at the foot of that grave.
They would cover them over with dirt and start a new burial plot.”
The
city’s reusing of graves on Hart Island is not a new practice.
According to city archives, in the 1930s the Department of Correction
issued disinterment permits for entire plots, with no medical reason or
family behind the requests for the permits.
Walsh,
who has long since retired and now runs a radiator-moving business in
Staten Island, is unsure if the practice is still used today. Repeated
phone calls and email messages left for the Department of Correction’s
Stephen Morello about whether the department still reuses gravesites
were not returned. But with the amount of bodies being sent to the
island each year, there is bound to be a space issue.
FOR MOST people
with relatives buried on Hart Island, all they really want is closure
through a visit or a place to memorialize the ones they lost. For
others—like mothers of stillborns—it was a huge mistake sending their
babies to the island in the first place.
The
city is also making it especially hard on mothers of stillborns to
obtain burial assistance funds. Even if they were made aware of the
money’s existence in the hospital, which they largely are not, it would
be nearly impossible to meet the Burial Unit’s application deadline of
60 days after a death. Though the city promises only a six-week waiting
period for a certificate of fetal death, as Quiroz and Wiley found out,
it can actually take much longer.
Without
a death certificate, funeral homes cannot perform a burial. As a
result, Harley, of the city’s Burial Unit, says that few mothers of
stillborn babies apply for burial assistance through the city.
“There are not a lot of people who request that,” he said. “Some do, but it’s a small percentage.”
Many mothers wish they had known about the burial assistance option in the first place.
If
Quiroz had, she wouldn’t be trying to find her son and possibly exhume
his body. She is so filled with remorse about her choice for her Elijah
that she is reluctant to even think about having another child any time
soon.
Even now,
Quiroz still can’t figure out why the hospital didn’t give her all the
information about her son’s gravesite or alternative burial options.
Maria
Smilios, director of Maternal and Fetal Medicine at Flushing Hospital
in Queens, where Quiroz had her baby, did not return repeated phone
calls and messages for comment about her department’s handling of
stillbirths and presenting mothers with burial information.
Having
recently received her son’s certificate of fetal death in the mail,
Quiroz is pursuing a visit to Hart Island to finally find her son, but
isn’t having much luck due to Zysk’s reassignment and unreturned phone
calls to the Department of Correction.
“I
feel frustrated because every time I feel I have made progress, it just
seems that I’m going nowhere,” she said. “I didn’t want this kind of
burial for my son, I would never have wanted something like this to
happen. Sadly, it has been the biggest regret of my life.”