‘The smell was overwhelming’: Dozens of human corpses were found inside moving trucks near a funeral home in New York City, discovered after neighbours complained of a sickening odour coming from the vehicles, which may have stored the corpses for weeks.

Residents of Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighbourhood had tried to ignore the stench, but on Wednesday police were finally called to investigate its source, stumbling upon 50 rotting corpses stacked inside four non-refrigerated trucks at the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home. Some residents told local media they’d noticed the odour for several weeks.

‘They were unloading bodies. They had bodies all over the floor inside the funeral home. They came out one by one, blood dripping,’ one local man told a New York CBS affiliate, adding that he saw funeral home workers moving the corpses without masks or gloves.

President of the Brooklyn borough, Eric Adams, said he arrived at the Cleckley facility on Wednesday evening to see what looked like a crime scene, with streets sealed off as officers inspected the trucks.

It appears the truck was full. They were trying to use U-Haul as a backup’ Adams said, adding: ’This is traumatizing to family members.’

The health crisis has put abnormal strain on New York city’s morgues and funeral homes, many of which are quickly running out of storage space for bodies. Though the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has provided refrigerated morgue trucks to deal with the excess deaths, some facilities are still struggling to cope with the invasion of corpses.

The owner of the facility told authorities he had done his best to deal with the overwhelming flow of bodies, attempting to load the trucks with ice, but to little effect. Though he was slapped with two citations for improper storage, the owner faces no criminal charges, according to NBC News.

Police say the bodies were transferred to a refrigerated vehicle later on Wednesday but added it was not clear how many of the deceased had allegedly succumbed to the coronavirus, as opposed to other causes. Source. THIS NEWS STORY SPONSORED BY DAGMAR, GERMANY