Outraged staff, local residents say Brooklyn nursing home kept dead coronavirus patients in room cooled only by air conditioning

Community leader Chris Banks speaks about the lack of protective gear and hazard pay for the staff at the Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation.

As the bodies began to pile up inside a Brooklyn nursing home, the staff was reportedly given specific directions: Turn up the air conditioner and open the windows to keep the smell of death from spreading.

Outraged community leaders joined staffers Tuesday outside the Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, where demonstrators complained as many as 10 bodies were stored in an unrefrigerated fourth floor dementia unit where the dead reside among the living — and ailing residents are reportedly free to wander.

“It could be your family members,” said certified nursing assistant Hilory McDonald, speaking outside the front entrance. “They’re telling (a female staffer) to go in and check the temperature in the room for dead bodies. She’s saying she never went to school for that.

"She doesn’t know what temperature a dead body is supposed to be kept at.”

A refrigerator truck parked Tuesday in the rear parking lot of the Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in East New York.(Gardiner Anderson/for New York Daily News)

Home workers said more than 25 people passed away over the past month in a facility where the morgue can only hold four bodies, raising fears about the spread of coronavirus among the already nervous staffers.

Though none of the dead were tested for COVID-19, their symptoms indicated all were victims of the deadly pandemic, said nursing assistant Alexis Lewis.

“We never had so many bodies in here,” said Lewis, a 20-year Linden Center veteran working the midnight shift for $18 an hour. "The way they store the bodies, we can get sick and other people to get sick. So we need somebody to step in and investigate.”

Alexis Lewis is pictured at work in the PPE provided by the center, which staff say is too flimsy to protect properly from COVID-19 transmission. (Photo provided by Lewis)

Other staffers are already missing their shifts after becoming symptomatic, increasing the stress level of those still on the job, she added.

The warehousing of the dead, like something out of a horror movie, was particularly difficult for workers who become like very close with the East New York facility’s estimated 400 residents.

“The only family they have is us,” said McDonald. “We’re closer to them than anyone else.”

Alexis Lewis, a certified nursing assistant, speaks in front of Linden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation— where the bodies of dead patients, who staffers fear had COVID-19, have overrun the small morgue and are now being stored in an unrefrigerated room. (Brittany Kriegstein/for New York Daily News)

The Linden Center did not immediately respond when the Daily News reached out for comment by phone and email. But a refrigerated truck was seen parked Tuesday behind the nursing home.

Local community leader Chris Banks charged the employees were also receiving inadequate PPE as they were asked to work in a building with a homemade morgue.

“The bodies have not been put in the proper places so they can be taken care of,” said Banks. “We have eyewitness testimony that they’ve seen a particular room in this building where there were bodies piled up ... It’s in a room that anyone can walk into.”

Rev. Kevin McCall of the Crisis Action Center suggested the center’s Brooklyn location played a part in the heartless treatment of the dead.

“You’ve been to the Javits Center, you’ve been to Westchester (County)," he said. “Come to the 'hood in East New York and help these workers.”