Bones in Brooklyn: The Journey of a Wandering Coffin

In 2015, an old coffin, complete with bones, was found dumped on a Brooklyn street. But why, who was it, and who did it?

Kate Cherrell

July 28, 2023

5–7 minutes

Abandoned, America, Brooklyn, Coffin, New York

In 2015, 67-year-old Felipe Figueroa was up at the crack of dawn, leaving his house at 5.30 to make his way to Happy Day Transit Inc. He had retired some time ago, but empty days hadn’t suited him and he soon returned to work. After parking his car at the company building in Bushwick, Brooklyn, his eyes were drawn to a large, strangely shaped box in the middle of the street.

Pilling Street was, rather fittingly, a dead end. It was also a popular spot for fly tippers, who would discard rubbish of all sizes at the end of the street. In the centre of the road was a long, brown, battered box covered in plastic and muddy blankets. It was only when Felipe got closer that he noticed the large metal bars either side and realised that this was no box, but a casket. A large municipal cemetery could be found very close by, but through a not insubstantial fence, so how on earth did it get there?

After calling the authorities, police attended the site and stood baffled at the battered casket. Deputy Inspector Maximo A. Tolentino took it upon himself to take a picture and tweet it, captioned with a strangely casual and pseudo text-speak comment of:

‘Nobody knows who dumped a casket with no body in it. Investigation is ongoing 2 find the people responsible. Not Cool’

I feel it’s also worth adding that in most reports of this story, the receptacle is referred to as a ‘coffin’, however, judging by photos, this is not the case. Much like the cemetery vs graveyard issue, the two are not the same, despite being used interchangeably in most fields. A coffin is anthropoidal shaped; i.e. shaped like a human. A casket is rectangular, and far larger. It is also infinitely more expensive and favoured far more in the US than in the UK.

The investigating officers looked within the casket and found only a glove and a sock, both containing human remains. Naturally, while local media picked up on the tweet and raced to the site, police officers approached representatives at the nearby Evergreens Cemetery, just in case one of their residents was missing. This line of inquiry died quickly as all of Evergreen’s dead were underground and accounted for, neither had there been any recent, or careless, exhumations.

As the plot thickened, the casket and its contents were shipped to the Chief Medical Examiner who started to process the contents. The casket itself was easy to identify, made by a company in Batesville, Indiana. And, after contacting the business, they revealed that they had just shipped a brand new casket to a funeral home in Brooklyn…

The next step was clear. Had there been an exhumation lately? An old switcharoo of coffins or caskets? Yes. On the day that the Pilling Street casket was found, an individual had been exhumed from the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island.

*Image by user ‘Richard’ via FindaGrave.com*

It’s curious to wonder why disinterments occur at all, but such requests are more common than one thinks, both in the UK and US. Aside from disinterments required for legal reasons, many other individuals are removed from their resting place to re-bury them elsewhere in the country, in a different local cemetery, or simply to re-bury the individual in a ‘better’ or ‘prime’ spot in the same site. Due to the processes of decay, these instances are never encouraged by burial sites. Not only is a lot of paperwork required, but families rarely consider the state of the body and the coffin, having been underground for a long period of time. As someone who was once in close quarters with a gravedigger, I can categorically say that every cemetery worker will have a horror story about unnecessary disinterment that’ll put you off your dinner for a month. Trust me. Leave the bodies where they are.

Back at the Frederick Douglass park, workers told police that the decendants of a man who died in 1989 wanted his body removed and reburied in a different cemetery, 52 miles east of his original resting place. As far as cemetery officials knew, all the paperwork had been completed, a funeral home (Matthew Barrett-R.S Saunders Funeral Home in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn) removed the casket and all was done by the end of the day.

But it turns out that those at the funeral home were a little sloppy with their work, which hardly seems excusable when dealing with human remains. They had indeed removed the man’s remains from the old casket, and placed them in a new one, but they’d done so with little care, later admitting to the police that ‘they didn’t do a very thorough search’ of the damaged casket. The damaged receptacle was then removed by a salvage operation at the cost of $100. Like many people who try their arm at making a quick buck, he had taken the casket and dumped it in a quiet area, instead of going to the trouble of legally disposing of the box. Police would soon question the man, and expressed an interest in charging him with illegal dumping.

Unsurprisingly, the funeral home kept quiet about the affair, meanwhile the family of the deceased man were distraught, and I for one hope that they obtained a full refund and at least a box of chocolates for losing their father’s appendages. Thankfully, the medical examiner released the remaining bones to the funeral home who reunited them with their owner in his new grassy home.

That is not to say that this story ends with a neat bow, as emotional trauma was brought about on many sides – not only to Mr Figueroa who found the remains, having lost his own son in recent years, but also the family of the deceased, who were presented with the realities of the reckless way in which their family member’s remains were handled.

It doesn’t appear that the funeral home is still in operation today, and we can only hope that while they were in business, they learned from their mistakes. Otherwise, let’s just hope that all of their clients enter the afterlife with all of their limbs intact…

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