She paid $15,000 for mom’s final arrangements — and now worries Brooklyn funeral home stored remains on unrefrigerated U-Haul truck

NYPD officers, DEP inspectors, and NYC Emergency Management responders investigate a report of bodies being transported and stored in U Haul trucks outside the Andrew T Cleckley Funeral Home on Utica Avenue in East Flatbush, Wednesday, April 29, 2020.

A Brooklyn woman says that weeks ago she paid a funeral home $15,000 to handle her mother’s final arrangements — and now wonders if she was one of the rotting corpses police found in unrefrigerated U-Haul trucks.

Tamisha Covington had questions Thursday for the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Flatlands.

“What’ve you all been doing to our mom? The whole time, she’s just been sitting in a truck?” Covington said she’d like to ask.

“How do we know? We don’t know,” Covington said.

State health department officials have opened a probe into the “unacceptable conditions” at the funeral home, located on Utica Ave. and Ave. M.

Cops on Wednesday found dozens of coprses stacked in two U-Haul trucks and a U-Haul van, along with several more bodies in two refrigerated trucks.

Mayor de Blasio on Thursday blasted the funeral parlor’s treatment of bodies amid a wave of deaths in New York City during the coronavirus pandemic.

“This horrible situation that occurred with the funeral home in Brooklyn — absolutely unacceptable,” de Blasio said during a briefing Thursday. The home “shouldn’t have let it happen.”

Covington, who showed up at the funeral home Thursday demanding answers, the situation wasn’t just unacceptable — it was heartbreaking.

Her mother, Deborah Harris, 60, died of a heart attack, possibly from coronavirus complications, in her Brooklyn home April 7. The funeral home took her body on April 9.

A casket is taken into the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home on Thursday, April 30, in Brooklyn. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

After two weeks of ducking her calls, she said, someone from the funeral home called her sister earlier in the week and gave her a funeral date, May 12.

Covington said she would have understood if the funeral home staff had told her they couldn’t handle the overflow and that a viewing wouldn’t be possible.

Instead, she said, the funeral home stayed mum.

“Be a little respectful for us. We’re mourning. We’re grieving," Covington said.

"Have a little courtesy for the dead,” she added. “And don’t be robbing us, cause we’re getting robbed.

"Why are we paying $15,000? Nobody can explain that. Can somebody tell us why they’re ripping us off instead of helping us, and now they got our loved ones in U-Hauls?”

The city said last week that bodies of some coronavirus victims will be temporarily frozen to reduce strain on hospitals and funeral homes with limited space to preserve the dead.

Somehow the effort didn’t cover the Andrew T. Cleckley home.

A woman who is inquiring about her deceased mother speaks to the media in front of the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home on Thursday, April 30. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, people walking by the trucks saw leakage and smelled the odor of death from one of them, said law enforcement sources. “I saw 15 bodies in the U-Haul box truck stacked up on one another, and more in the other,” one officer at the scene told The News.

Other witnesses said they’d been watching corpses loaded onto the trucks for days.

De Blasio said Thursday what happened was “unconscionable” and that he was “very disappointed” the funeral home didn’t contact the city or state or reach out to the NYPD for help.

“I’m sorry, it’s not hard to figure out. If nothing else is working, call the NYPD,” the mayor said. “It was an emergency situation.”

The state Health Department, which regulates funeral homes, hasn’t determined what penalty the funeral home owner may face. The home’s operator, Andrew Cleckley, could be fined, be temporarily suspended from the business, or have his license revoked, , state officials said.

The bodies found in the trucks are being brought to a morgue in Brooklyn, officials said.

Cleckley, who refers to himself as “The Undertaker" on his Facebook page, did not return messages seeking comment Thursday. A woman answering the door at a relative’s Queens home yelled, "He’s not here, do not come here, he’s not here!”

A NYPD officer walks up beside rental trucks and a hearse that have their back-ends covered by a tarp outside the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home, Thursday, April 30, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (John Minchillo/AP)

Families and funeral homes who can’t immediately collect and handle bodies can ask the city medical examiner’s office to temporarily store the dead until arrangements are made.

Coronavirus victims will only be buried at the city’s potter’s field on Hart Island if they cannot be identified or next of kin hasn’t been reached about 15 days after death.

During the pandemic, the city is transferring some victims’ bodies from morgues and refrigerated trailers to freezer trucks to ensure they don’t decompose.

A NYPD vehicle is parked beside rental trucks and a hearse outside the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home, Thursday, April 30. (John Minchillo/AP)

But once a funeral home collects remains, they can’t be returned to the medical examiner’s office.

Asked if funeral homes should be able to send bodies back to the medical examiner if they run out of space and take on too many remains, de Blasio said he didn’t know the details about the city’s handling of the situation.

But the mayor said funeral homes have an “obligation to the people they serve to treat them with dignity.”

De Blasio said the city should organize a bereavement committee as proposed by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.

The committee would include representatives of the medical examiner’s office and the city’s funeral homes. Adams said the idea is to help funeral home directors overwhelmed in the pandemic.