Ciro Ferrer, of Cuba, lies in Trench 357, where four dozen of 150 bodies have Hispanic names amid an Ellis Island grab bag. For 25 years, working in a food market in Elmhurst, Queens, Mr. Ferrer supported his wife and three children in Havana. But after the authorities found him disheveled and malnourished, wandering the streets near the Elmhurst apartment where he lived alone, he was initially described in records as 70, single and childless.
He told a court-appointed evaluator about his Cuban family after receiving a dementia diagnosis in 2007 and being placed at New Surfside Nursing Home in Far Rockaway, Queens. His guardianship file includes the Havana address and phone number of his wife, Regla, and even a 2008 report by his guardian citing a plan to buy him a phone card to call family “outside the country.”
But that never happened. The guardian, Nicholas S. Ratush, who collected $400 every month as a fee from Mr. Ferrer’s $669 Social Security check and paid the nursing home the rest, now says that he was unaware of any relatives and so could not notify any when Mr. Ferrer died on Oct. 29, 2012.
In Havana, Mr. Ferrer’s daughter, Ilda, 53, learned of her father’s death three years later from The Times. He was still alive, eight years ago, when her mother received a letter from the court evaluator saying that Mr. Ferrer was unable to care for himself, but her efforts to reply by phone and email went unanswered. Mr. Ferrer’s wife died soon afterward, and the children tried in vain to reach their father through the Red Cross and the United States government.
“We could do nothing,” his daughter said, “but let him die alone.”
The New York Times, by Nina Bernstein
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html
