Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field | Hacker News Reader

Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field

nytimes.com

35 pointsnnx7 comments

This is nothing new. Municipalities have been doing this kind of thing for centuries.

My grandfather was an alcoholic who became homeless. He was also a WW2 vet that had shell shock from the Battle of the Bulge (likely cause of his alcoholism). He passed out on a street corner in Chicago and died 48 hours later from cirrhosis of the liver. For 20 years we did not know what happened to him. Cook County said that they buried him in a cemetery. We went to the cemetery on the death certificate and could not find the grave and the cemetery had no record of his burial. We called about two dozen cemeteries trying to find him but also nothing. We later found out that there was a scandal in Cook County at the time where indigent burials were done in a mass grave in Indiana and the burial money was siphoned off and pocketed. We are resigned to the fact now that we will never find him.

That's literally robbing the dead. Thanks to your grandfather and hundreds of thousands like him Europe as I know it exists (though there are plenty of forces at work to destroy it again). It's pretty sad. I visited a number of war grave sites a few years go to help someone locate a family member and I was struck with how meticulously all the graves were kept, they looked as through they had been made a few weeks earlier. Flowers on many of them. Sad to see how your granddad ended up forgotten and cheated like that.

Sorry to hear this. Sounds like very typically Chicago corruption. It's a shame people keep reelecting criminals there

I see comments complaining about this (generally on a national level) on HN almost daily.

The weekly a highly-upvoted thread, such as the Assange thread yesterday, is filled with it (most seemed to not be too thrilled with Assange particularly, but angered by political issues around him)

Well anyways, my point is that I guess the benefactors of all of this corruption and authoritarianism are thrilled that the best minds are occupied with demanding jobs.

The City of Chicago and Cook County are two very, very, very different government agencies.

Fun exercise: Bring up Google Maps and type in 'Chicago City Hall'. Zoom in on the satellite view. The east half of the building is Cook County administration and the west half is City of Chicago. Notice any difference? One side doesn't do any work, the other overpays and/or has favorite vendors.

The New York times did a fascinating article about Potter's Field on Hart Island[1]. One story from the article I recall is of a woman who died in her multi-million dollar apartment in the Dakota building in Manhattan and how she ended up in a mass grave full of strangers in Potter's field. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-...

Reminds me of the story of the heroic woman in Arkansas who, during the same period, helped hundreds of victims living their last days on Earth: https://m.arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemeter...

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