Leola Dickerson burial record | The Hart Island Project

Also from The New York Times article by Nina Bernstein

"....When Leola Dickerson fell to the floor of her house in Pleasantville, N.J., in February 2006, no one was there to notice. Her dog, Champ, waited in vain to be let in. Her upstairs tenant came and went by an outside staircase. Days passed before a mail carrier found her, barely conscious, and called 911.

Her husband, one of 10 siblings, had wanted to retire to live with relatives in rural Alabama, before he died. But Ms. Dickerson, born near Tuskegee in 1919, refused to go back. “I’m out of the South,” she would say. “We’re set in our ways, and God has blessed us.”

Family photographs covered her parlor walls: the children who had called her Grandma on visits from the South after she married their grandfather, Mango, in the 1960s; Mango’s nephew Joseph Dixon, the boy she had raised as her son; the grandsons of her deceased employers, Milton and Helen Katz, who had always treated her like kin. Black and white and tan, the faces overlapped inside old picture frames.

When Leola Dickerson died in a city hospital in 2008, she was the ward of a court-appointed guardian who let her body go unclaimed at the morgue.

But at 86, Ms. Dickerson’s sole blood relative was her younger brother in New York, Johnny Maddox. After an ambulance took her to a hospital in New Jersey, he arranged to move her to a nursing home in Queens. The nursing home, saying she had dementia, petitioned the Queens County Court to appoint a guardian to manage her affairs and assets, including her house, valued at $88,200, and her monthly Social Security check of $783.

So began Leola Dickerson’s two-year journey to Hart Island.

In Pensacola, Fla., her dead husband’s granddaughter, Constance Dickerson Williams, knew something was wrong. She kept trying to call Grandma Leola, but no one answered. Finally she wrote, but there was no response.

In New York, everyone agreed that Ms. Dickerson needed a guardian, and the court appointed one from a list of lawyers.

On paper, Ms. Dickerson was now covered. By law, the guardian was to “exercise the utmost care and diligence when acting on behalf of the incapacitated person” and show “trust, loyalty and fidelity.” His powers and duties included creating “an irrevocable burial trust fund,” notifying relatives in the event of death and paying reasonable funeral expenses out of remaining assets.

But guardians are paid out of those same assets, and a house on the outskirts of Atlantic City did not promise much. Moreover, the nursing home’s lawyers were already claiming thousands of dollars in legal fees for bringing the guardianship petition in the first place.

A year went by as two appointed lawyers in succession declined to serve as her guardian. A third accepted but failed even to file the paperwork required to act on Ms. Dickerson’s behalf. After an appeal by Dr. Michael Katz, a physician and the elder son of Ms. Dickerson’s employers, the court appointed a fourth lawyer in October 2007. But by year’s end he had not submitted the necessary documents, either.

The need to safeguard or sell Ms. Dickerson’s house was urgent, Dr. Katz knew. He had rescued her from predatory lenders, covered $45,000 in needed repairs with a family loan and helped her collect rent from her tenant. Now, dying of a heart condition, Dr. Katz saw the empty house falling prey to squatters and scavengers.

“Leola Dickerson has been part of our family for 50 years,” he had written in a eulogy for his mother in 2000, when she died of Alzheimer’s disease at 86, tended by Ms. Dickerson, then 80. “Her years of devotion and caring for our parents will always be appreciated and never forgotten.”

Ms. Dickerson’s house in Pleasantville, N.J., fell prey to scavengers after she entered a nursing home. It then went into foreclosure.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Dr. Katz, 69, died on Jan. 18, 2008, and was buried three days later. Ms. Dickerson died at a Queens hospital on Jan. 22. Her body would wait in the morgue for three months and 21 days.

For a long time already, her adoptive son, Joseph Dixon, had been trying to find her. “She was a good mother,” he would say later. “Everybody loved her.”

Their relationship had suffered after he left the Army and struggled with drugs. Nevertheless, he visited her in the hospital in 2006 after learning of her fall. When he returned the next morning, she was gone and the hospital would not tell him where. They kept insisting, “She doesn’t have any kids.”

There had never been a formal adoption. But inside the locked Pleasantville house lay his high school diploma and his formal Army portrait. Outside towered the tree he had planted in fourth grade. He tried to find out who controlled the property, to no avail. One day the garage door was open, and the blue Thunderbird that Ms. Dickerson called her “baby” was gone. He figured then that she had passed.

Notice of her death went to her baby brother, Mr. Maddox, a diabetic undergoing a double amputation. “He was in bad shape when she passed,” the brother’s widow, Bernice, recalled. “He was in no position.”

Notice also went to the guardian and to the Queens County public administrator’s office, which calculated that she had only $342.24 left. It would go toward a $7,771.18 claim by the nursing home’s lawyers, or to offset $124,258.85 paid to the home by Medicaid.

That year the city referred 80 unclaimed Queens bodies to medical schools. Whether Ms. Dickerson was among them is not a matter of public record, but her burial site is: Trench 331, with 162 other bodies.

Even as her grave sank under bulldozers digging new trenches for the unclaimed, the unpaid tax liens on her house were being bought at auction, repackaged and resold for profit by various hedge funds.

By then the house was a boarded-up ruin where drug deals went down. When a stepgrandson, Thackus Dickerson, finally arrived, trying to find out what had happened to Grandma Leola, sheriff’s deputies showed up to demand his ID.

Yet the guardian and the nursing home’s lawyers were still battling for the last of her Social Security in 2012, four years after her death, the guardian claiming $23,793.69 in legal fees. He lost. The judge granted him just $1,576, and it became another uncollectable lien against a house in foreclosure that he never went to see.

The guardian, Jay Stuart Dankberg, 70, is a large man who wears big gold rings and meets visitors in a shabby Manhattan office crammed with overflowing cartons. He readily remembered the Dickerson case as a financial disappointment, but said he was hearing of his ward’s Hart Island burial for the first time.

“It shocks me,” Mr. Dankberg said. “I certainly should be paid, and certainly she shouldn’t be buried in potter’s field.”

Where did he think she would be buried?

“I hadn’t given it any thought,” he replied.