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.”