MTA accused of storing dead bodies in employee break rooms
Stand clear of the dead bodies.
“Leaking” corpses of people killed by subway trains are often brought to employee lunch rooms and other break areas inside stations, disgusted union officials and sources said on Monday.
In an effort to restore service quickly, bodies are simply carted off to “whatever room happens to be nearest,” a union source told The Post.
“If a lunch room is the nearest, they’ll put it in the lunch room,” the source said.
And that’s enough to make transit workers lose their lunch.
LaShawn Jones, 52, who has been a station agent for 18 years, said she was coming into work at the 103rd Street 1 train station about five years ago — and made a quick stop in the employee bathroom when she saw some NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers handling a body inside.
“They weren’t aware that I was coming in and I wasn’t aware that they were in there,” Jones told The Post. “All I remember seeing was a black bag with purplish stuff.”
Jones returned to the bathroom on her lunch break — and though the body was gone, she saw some remains in the sink, she said.
“I had no idea what ESU does in the sink, but when it was time to wash my hands, there was hair and scalp and basically body parts in the sink,” she said. “That was very disturbing.”
She said she immediately went to her booth and called her supervisor. The mess was eventually cleaned up, “but the fact I had to experience that was disgusting,” she said.
“That can totally mess with your psyche, not just for that day but for the future as well,” Jones added. “I couldn’t go home. I was hysterical and I was crying, but by the time the supervisor got there, I calmed myself down.”
Several other station agents railed about the situation on a private Facebook group conversation for station agents, obtained by The Post.
“Transit does not care about morale,” Taytana A. Klimenko wrote. “They do not invest in psychological welfare for their workers. I am surprised we do not have a high suicide rate — we must have some strong workers. Very tough. Something the union should look to invest into?”
“Be a pro?” Tommy McNally, a Transport Workers Union safety inspector from Staten Island posted. “Station Agents walking over bodies in the bathroom? Uncovered bodies leaking fluids..be a pro…this isn’t Vietnam pal….be a pro and suck it up if you get hepatitis…? No, close the station, put the body in a bag, on the platform, wait for the morgue to take it…then open the station.”
Theresa Green, a station agent for 28 years who is a member of the TWU Local 100 union, told The Chief-Leader, which first reported the story, that dead bodies at subway stations have been handled this way for years and “nothing was ever done.”
“I saw this on April 7, 2008 when someone committed suicide in the Franklin Ave. C station in Brooklyn, and it still goes on because this is their procedure,” Green told the paper, which was the first to report the story.
Union officials said it takes at least two hours for a corpse to leave the station.
“The police are forced [to] store the bodies in utility rooms and other subway rooms while waiting for Medical Examiner’s Office staff to arrive. It’s unacceptable that transit workers have to endure this on the job,” a TWU Local 100 spokesperson said in a statement. “Mayor de Blasio and his administration have failed to provide enough staffing for the Medical Examiner’s Office to quickly retrieve and remove bodies from the subway after these tragedies.”
An MTA source insisted that bodies are not stored in break rooms, but rather temporarily kept in non-public areas by the NYPD while they wait for the Medical Examiner to show up.
In a statement, an MTA spokesperson said that “it’s of the utmost importance” that anyone who dies in the subway system is removed from the tracks and platforms as fast as possible “to restore service quickly and to give humane treatment to the deceased and their family.”
“The placement and removal of bodies are handled by NYPD and the NYC Medical Examiner, and we’re discussing with TWU officials how any of the current practices can be enhanced for the comfort of our workers,” the statement said.
Only members of the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit can remove dead bodies from a subway track or tunnel, according to a section of the department’s patrol guide provided to The Post.