54 Time November 30/December 7, 2020
The sun has barely risen above The glassy
surface of Long Island Sound. A breeze sweeps over
an island half a mile from the Bronx where 15 work-
ers watch a backhoe remove the layer of soil that sep-
arates a mass grave from the outside world. There
are 1,165 identical pine caskets stacked three high,
two wide in this football-field-size pit. The men are
here to find and dig up casket No. 40-3.
The backhoe churns up a layer of gray sand, a signthat the caskets are close. Already sweating in their
hazmat suits, the workers climb 10 ft. down into the
hole, shovels in their gloved hands. The grave is more
than two months old. The smell seeps through their
protective masks. As they dig, three coffins come
into view, identifying numbers bored into the pine
at one end. “Four-zero-dash-three,” one of the men
shouts over the noise of the diesel engine. They set
about retrieving the box, and its occupant, from the
anonymous earth.
Hart Island is a graveyard of last resort. Since1869, New York City has owned and operated this
potter’s field—the largest in the country. City work-
ers put unidentified or unclaimed corpses in simple
wooden coffins, load them onto a ferry and entomb
them in trenches across the island. The homeless,
indigent and stillborn all lie within eyesight of the
hyper kinetic, high-rolling inhabitants of the Manhat-
tan skyscrapers across the water. “Hart Island is like
a shadow of New York City,” says Justin von Bujdoss,
45, the cemetery’s chaplain. “It reflects the lives of
people who live on the margins—the homeless, the
sickly, the neglected, the forgotten and overworked.”
Over a century and a half, more than a million people
have been buried in unmarked graves on the island,
including from past epidemics like tuberculosis, the
1918 flu and AIDS.
“No one lives their lives believing it will end here,”von Bujdoss says.
But nine months into the pandemic that has killedmore than 250,000 Americans, one lesson is clear:
no one escapes the virus. It infects paupers and Presi-
dents alike. Even those who don’t get it have been af-
fected as the disease crushes economies, strains our
health care system and pulls comfortable families
back into hardship. Hart Island is once again reflect-
ing this latest dark truth: many who thought they
were immune to America’s inequalities are vulner-
able in this pandemic.
At the height of the outbreak last spring, NewYork’s hospital morgues and mortuaries became
overwhelmed, and the mass graves on Hart Island
emerged as an expedient option for the city’s fast-
rising number of dead. More coffins were stacked
aboard the ferry dispatched to the dock here. More
trenches were dug. Through the end of October,
2,009 New Yorkers have been buried on Hart Island
in 2020, more than double last year’s total of 846.
No one knows how many of the people arriving
here died of COVID-19. At points, the city was so
overwhelmed that bodies were sent to the island
before authorities had a chance to determine their
cause of death or track down next of kin. Some fam-
ilies chose to have their loved ones buried here.
Some families had no other option. And some fami-
lies weren’t aware their relative had died in the first
place. “We figured that most of them would be dis-
interred because we were moving so quickly,” says
Alex Mahoney, 55, executive director of facilities at
the city’s department of correction (DOC), which
oversees operations at the cemetery.
Not all of them were forgotten. Social workers,
government employees and families have worked to
identify people lost in the chaos of the COVID-19
crisis, and now, where once the ferry ride to Hart Is-
land was usually a one-way crossing, dozens of those
interred here this year are expected to make the trip
back. So far, 32 bodies buried in 2020 have been
claimed and removed from the graveyard.
As infections spike this fall, New York City is brac-
ing for another wave of death. The coroner’s office
has once again readied the temporary morgues and
box trucks that hold the dead before they head for
the potter’s field. In October alone, 360 corpses were
buried on Hart Island, more than four times as many
as in the same month last year. As they prepare for the
next crisis, city officials anticipate more family mem-
bers will come forward to exhume their loved ones.
No one knows who will be carried across the water
to Hart Island on the next waves of the dead. No one
knows who will be brought back from its anonymous
earth by shovel-bearing workers in hazmat suits.
This summer, TIME was granted unprecedented ac-
cess to Hart Island to observe burial and exhumation
operations and, on June 26, witnessed the retrieval
and formal reburial of casket 40-3 and its occupant,
Ellen F. Torron. This is her story.The firsT sign of trouble came when tenants of
the red brick Queens apartment building complained
about a lingering smell on the fifth floor. Their calls
went to Enis Radoncic, 43, a hardworking Bosnian
immigrant, who is the building’s porter. He thought
it might be a plumbing problem and that it would
dissipate. But it didn’t.
Radoncic ultimately traced the stench to the unit
next to the elevator, 5G, which belonged to Ellen Tor-
ron, a slight 74-year-old woman with short gray hairNation