It’s a family’s worst nightmare.
After years of battling addiction, Leford Williams, 55, fatally overdosed in a Starbucks bathroom in the East Village on a cocktail of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin. Police arrived, and EMS workers rushed him to Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital. But he couldn’t be saved.
But for 53 days in 2022, Williams’ family had no idea what happened to him. They searched the streets, parks, rehab centers and hospitals, not knowing if he was dead or alive. When his remains were finally returned to them, they were “badly decomposed,” according to a letter from the funeral parlor.
Now Williams’ family is suing the city, saying they were robbed of the chance to properly mourn their brother and uncle — and when they finally did have their chance, their grief was compounded by the indifference of city agencies.
“What you did to my brother you should never do to anyone,” said Geneva Gee, 51. “This is not a throwaway child.”
The suit alleges that the agencies and the hospital that handled Williams' remains violated a little-known protection in the law guaranteeing the “right of sepulcher,” or right to a burial within a “reasonable time” after death.
Gee asked how her brother, who at the time of his death had a license on him listing an address the family shared in Bedford-Stuyvesant, as well as a phone containing multiple relatives’ phone numbers, could simply fall through the cracks.
“You saw a Black male on drugs,” she said. “Autopsy to a potter's field. It seems like that's the pipeline.”
Williams’ death in March 2022 came amid a continued surge in overdose deaths in the city. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, accounts for a large share of the deaths. The medical examiner’s office has struggled to keep up.
In the last fiscal year, the city saw a 20% spike in postmortem toxicology cases over the previous year. Autopsies and toxicology reports are taking upwards of 100 days, more than twice as long as they did before the pandemic, according to the city’s latest Mayor’s Management Report.
Julie Bolcer, a spokesperson for the medical examiner’s office, said that backlog doesn’t affect a family’s ability to claim their loved ones’ remains. She said all procedures were properly followed in Williams’ case. After initial publication of this story, Bolcer said the agency made multiple attempts to reach Williams’ family. Mount Sinai responded two days after the initial publication of this story to say it too made attempts to reach Williams' family.
Bolcer referred additional questions to the city’s Law Department.The family’s lawsuit also named the NYPD and Mount Sinai Hospital for failing to notify them about his death despite having some type of contact with him after his overdose. A spokesperson for the NYPD declined to comment on the pending litigation. Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department, said the case is being reviewed.
Williams’ loved ones called him “LJ” and described him as a style-conscious street vendor who was always on the lookout for a pair of shoes or a jacket that would look good on one of his three siblings or eight nieces and nephews. He grew up between Bedford-Stuyvesant and South Carolina, served in the U.S. Navy as a young adult, and spent years arranging and delivering flowers for shops on the Upper East Side. Even as he battled addiction over many years, his family said he was genuine and generous, never pushing them away.
Leford Williams as a young man
“Some people struggle with things and they hide,” said Amira Gee, Williams’ 27-year-old niece. “But Uncle was present, encouraging us to continue going. No matter what struggles he had, he was always there.”
So when two weeks went by without word from Williams, the family started to worry.
They tried filing a missing persons report, but police told them they couldn’t do so because Williams was an adult. They visited various rehab centers where he’d spent time to no avail. At one precinct in Bed-Stuy, police said there was no record of an arrest or an “aided report,” which is supposed to be filed when someone is injured and police are called. At another precinct in Manhattan, a police officer asked Gee if her brother used drugs. When Gee told the officer he had, the officer suggested she go looking for him on foot.
“‘They go on binges sometimes and sometimes they wake up, and they don't know if it's like a day or a month,’” Gee recalled the officer telling her. “‘You might just wanna check the parks.’”
So she did. Various family members spent days walking around parks on the Lower East Side in their spare time, still not able to locate Williams. As the weeks dragged on, the family got increasingly desperate and considered hiring a private investigator, according to the lawsuit. Then by chance on April 23, Williams’ niece Amira tried searching the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. She’d searched the online database once before in March and nothing came up, but this time she found a match.
“My daughter just screamed out like, ‘I'm so sorry, mommy, I'm so sorry,’” Gee said.
A month-and-a-half after Williams passed away, they finally had their answer: He was gone.
Leford WIlliams, left, as a young man with his siblings.
In the days that followed, the family was able to begin to piece together what had happened. They learned about his overdose at the Starbucks from the medical examiner's office. A few days later they got a bill in the mail from Mount Sinai for $2,000, which is how they learned he’d been treated there. While the hospital staff hadn’t managed to contact them about Williams’ death itself, the billing department had no trouble finding them.
Attorneys for Mount Sinai have denied the family’s allegations in legal filings, and a spokesperson for the hospital didn't return a request for additional comment right away.
When Williams' body was finally released and transported to a funeral home in South Carolina by early May, family members were in for another shock.
“I saw the body and it just, we'll just say it just wasn't fit for viewing,” said another sister, Deborah Walker, declining to speak further about what she’d seen. A letter the family shared from the Henryhand Funeral Home in Kingstree, South Carolina, described Williams’ remains as being in a “state of decomposition, including his face.” The letter went on to describe “skin slippage on his face and body.”
This, on top of weeks of confusion and alarm over not knowing Williams’ fate, compelled the siblings to sue, in the hope that no other family would have to go through what they did. They plan to hold a vigil in his honor outside Mount Sinai Hospital on March 30, just over a year after his death.
“You put him on the unclaimed [database] as if we don’t want to claim him,” said brother Clifford Williams. “My brother was never missing. That’s why I call it an intentional withholding.”
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the date of a vigil planned to honor Leford Williams and the name of Williams' sister. This story has also been updated with additional information from the medical examiner's office and to reflect which Mount Sinai facility Williams was treated at.
