Time - USA (2020-11-30)

56 Time November 30/December 7, 2020

and piercing dark brown eyes who had lived alone in

the building for more than 20 years. She tended to

shy away from small talk and appeared to be some-

thing of a germaphobe, covering her hands with sur-

geon’s gloves and her face with a mask—even before

the pandemic.

It didn’t surprise Radoncic when she didn’t an-

swer his knocks at the door nor the letter he slid

under neath it. But after calls to her cell phone went

unanswered, he called the police. “We thought she

barricaded herself inside because she was scared of

the virus,” Radoncic says.

At around 2 p.m. on March 16, Radoncic watched

as a locksmith picked the nickel-plated dead bolt to

allow New York police officers inside her apartment.

The odor swept over them, forcing their hands to

their noses. When the dull gray door swung open, it

revealed a floor-to-ceiling mess inside the 800-sq.-

ft. studio apartment.

Torron was a hoarder. Discarded Stouffer’s micro-

wave dinner boxes, empty SkinnyPop

chip bags, mismatched suitcases, bags

of trash, clothes, books, magazines

and paperwork were tangled together,

waist-high. The police pushed inside,

following a narrow path carved among

the thousands of things packed tightly

from the front door to her twin bed

and from there to her adjoining bath-

room. In the bathtub, they found Tor-

ron’s body under the murky water. She

had been dead for days, possibly weeks.

Cable news droned away on her

flat-screen television. The letter from

building management remained unopened at the

foot of the door. There were no signs of struggle

or injury, and police ruled out foul play. After Rad-

oncic identified Torron’s bloated body, a transport

team from the office of the chief medical examiner

zipped her into a body bag and drove her in a black

truck to the morgue at Queens Hospital Center.

No friends or family came forward to claim the

remains. Radoncic and neighbors did not know of

any spouse or children. The job of settling her es-

tate fell to the Queens County public administrator,

an obscure agency that identifies unclaimed per-

sons’ financial assets and next of kin. On a cursory

look around the apartment, investigators found

Torron’s birth certificate. But the pandemic’s crush

of cases and enforced lockdowns prevented inves-

tigators from returning to her apartment to rum-

mage for evidence of a burial plot, any life savings

or a will.

So Torron’s last wishes remained unknown as her

body lay inside a refrigerated drawer at the morgue

for the next 24 days. An autopsy determined her

cause of death was arteriosclerotic cardiovascular

disease. The medical examiner couldn’t tell whether

or not she had contracted COVID-19, but she died

just as the disease was beginning to ravage New York

City. In March and April, the death count mounted

to more than 27,000, or six times the normal level,

and the city’s death care system was overwhelmed.

The influx of corpses forced municipal morgues to

free up space. With room running out, Torron’s body

was placed inside a pine box and prepared for pas-

sage to Hart Island.

Just after dawn on April 9, a white box truck car-

rying Torron’s body and 23 other dead New Yorkers

rolled onto the 58-year-old steel ferry, the Michael

Cosgrove, for the half-mile voyage from a fenced-off

pier on City Island. It’s a 10-minute trip. Once the

boat makes its way across the water, it slows to a put-

ter near the dock. Two crew members jump out and

begin pulling steel chains that lower a short mechani-

cal dock into place, inch by inch.

The truck lurches forward onto the island and

turns east down a gravel road below a lane of wil-

lows, scattering a family of deer. It rumbles past

crumbling, abandoned brick buildings once used to

house a mental hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium,

a drug addicts’ workhouse, a boys’ reformatory and

a host of other Dickensian operations since the Civil

War. The cemetery run on the island has always been

part of this place.

Potter’s field is a biblical term from the New Tes-

tament that refers to land purchased by Jewish high

priests with the 30 pieces of silver returned by a

repentant Judas. The clay-heavy land was unsuit-

able for farming, so it would instead be used to bury

“strangers.” In New York City, these strangers have

always been a cross section of America’s down-

trodden and overlooked: poor workers of all races

and backgrounds, criminals, the mentally ill and

any unidentified person with no one to claim them.

A cemetery, especially one with more than 1 mil-

lion bodies, is a place where you would expect peo-

ple to gather to celebrate many lives lived. Not here.

Hart Island may be a rather easy place to reach if

you’re deceased but not if you’re among the liv-

ing. Family-member graveside visits are allowed

only twice a month, require weeks of careful plan-

ning and must be authorized by the DOC, which for

much of the past 151 years has been responsible for

providing the labor and oversight for the burials at

Hart Island.

The bodies are buried over 131 acres of roll-

ing meadows. The only signs of the dead are 3-ft.

white posts stuck in the ground every 25 yd. or so.

Each marker signifies 150 bodies below, and they

are every where on the island. Quiet reigns on Hart

Island, except for the occasional jangle of a nearby

bell buoy afloat in the water. Sailboats glide along

in the distance. Seagulls wheel overhead and nib-

ble atop rocks half submerged in the receding tide.

‘Hart Island is

like a shadow of

New York City. No

one lives their

lives believing it

will end here.’

—Justin von Bujdoss, Hart Island

cemetery chaplain

Nation