Τετάρτη 21 Οκτωβρίου 2015

The Lonely Death of George Bell

They found him in the living room, crumpled up on the mottled carpet. The police did. Sniffing a fetid odor, a neighbor had called 911. The apartment was in north-central Queens, in an unassertive building on 79th Street in Jackson Heights.
The apartment belonged to a George Bell. He lived alone. Thus the presumption was that the corpse also belonged to George Bell. It was a plausible supposition, but it remained just that, for the puffy body on the floor was decomposed and unrecognizable. Clearly the man had not died on July 12, the Saturday last year when he was discovered, nor the day before nor the day before that. He had lain there for a while, nothing to announce his departure to the world, while the hyperkinetic city around him hurried on with its business.
Then the smell of death and the police and the sobering reason that George Bell did not move his car.

Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, and each year the mortality rate seems to graze a new low, with people living healthier and longer. A great majority of the deceased have relatives and friends who soon learn of their passing and tearfully assemble at their funeral. A reverent death notice appears. Sympathy cards accumulate. When the celebrated die or there is some heart-rending killing of the innocent, the entire city might weep.
A much tinier number die alone in unwatched struggles. No one collects their bodies. No one mourns the conclusion of a life. They are just a name added to the death tables. In the year 2014, George Bell, age 72, was among those names.
George Bell — a simple name, two syllables, the minimum. There were no obvious answers as to who he was or what shape his life had taken. What worries weighed on him. Whom he loved and who loved him.
Like most New Yorkers, he lived in the corners, under the pale light of obscurity.
Yet death even in such forlorn form can cause a surprising amount of activity, setting off an elaborate, lurching process that involves a hodgepodge of interlocking characters whose livelihoods flow in part or in whole from death.

With George Bell, the ripples from the process would spill improbably and seemingly by happenstance from the shadows of Queens to upstate New York and Virginia and Florida. Dozens of people who never knew him, all cogs in the city’s complicated machinery of mortality, would find themselves settling the affairs of an ordinary man who left this world without anyone in particular noticing.
In discovering a death, you find a life story and perhaps meaning. Could anything in the map of George Bell’s existence have explained his lonely end? Possibly not. But it was true that George Bell died carrying some secrets. Secrets about how he lived and secrets about who mattered most to him. Those secrets would bring sorrow. At the same time, they would deliver rewards. Death does that. It closes doors but also opens them.
ONCE FIREFIGHTERS had jimmied the door that July afternoon, the police squeezed into a beaten apartment groaning with possessions, a grotesque parody of the “lived-in” condition. Clearly, its occupant had been a hoarder.
The officers from the 115th Precinct called the medical examiner’s office, which involves itself in suspicious deaths and unidentified bodies, and a medical legal investigator arrived. His task was to rule out foul play and look for evidence that could help locate the next of kin and identify the body. In short order, it was clear that nothing criminal had taken place (no sign of forced entry, bullet wounds, congealed blood).
A Fire Department paramedic made the obvious pronouncement that the man was dead; even a skeleton must be formally declared no longer living. The body was zipped into a human remains pouch. A transport team from the medical examiner’s office drove it to the morgue at Queens Hospital Center, where it was deposited in one of some 100 refrigerated drawers, cooled to 35 degrees.
It falls to the police to notify next of kin, but the neighbors did not know of any. Detectives grabbed some names and phone numbers from the apartment, called them and got nothing: The man had no wife, no siblings. The police estimate that they reach kin 85 percent of the time. They struck out with George Bell.

At the Queens morgue, identification personnel got started. Something like 90 percent of the corpses arriving at city morgues are identified by relatives or friends after they are shown photographs of the body. Most remains depart for burial within a few days. For the rest, it gets complicated.
The easiest resolution is furnished by fingerprints; otherwise by dental and medical records or, as a last resort, by DNA. The medical examiner can also do a so-called contextual ID; when all elements are considered, none of which by themselves bring certainty, a sort of circumstantial identification can be made.
Fingerprints were taken, which required days because of the poor condition of the fingers. Enhanced techniques had to be used, such as soaking the fingers in a solution to soften them. The prints were sent to city, state and federal databases. No hits.
ONCE NINE DAYS had elapsed and no next of kin had come forth, the medical examiner reported the death to the office of the Queens County public administrator, an obscure agency that operates out of the State Supreme Court building in the Jamaica neighborhood. Its austere quarters are adjacent to Surrogate’s Court, familiarly known as widows and orphans court, where wills are probated and battles are often waged over the dead.
Each county in New York City has a public administrator to manage estates when there is no one else to do so, most commonly when there is no will or no known heirs.
 Public administrators tend to rouse attention only when complaints flare over their competence or their fees or their tendency to oversee dens of political patronage. Or when they run afoul of the law. Last year, a former longtime counsel to the Bronx County public administrator pleaded guilty to grand larceny, while a bookkeeper for the Kings County public administrator was sentenced to a prison term for stealing from the dead.
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