A Chance to Be Mourned - New York Times:
At first he was just another homeless man taking refuge from the bitter New York winter. Then he collapsed. He was unconscious when paramedics pulled him out of the subway car. He died a few hours later at Brooklyn Hospital Center in Downtown Brooklyn of an inflamed pancreas and a weakened heart. It was two days before Christmas 2003. He was 48.
In life he was a stocky man with gentle eyes, a short beard and a wide smile. His name was Lewis Haggins Jr., though everyone called him Lou. As it turned out, he had a large circle of friends in the homeless community, along with family in New Jersey. But like many who teeter on the city’s edge, this man carried no ID. For weeks, his body lay unclaimed in the city morgue.
Two months after that final subway ride, Mr. Haggins’s body was placed in a pine coffin and sent to Potter’s Field on Hart Island, east of the Bronx, the city’s cemetery for the poor, the unknown and the unclaimed. Over the past 137 years, an estimated 800,000 people have been buried there. On Feb. 25, 2004, Mr. Haggins was placed in a common grave with 149 others.
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