On Monday morning, funeral director Paul DeNigris parked his Dodge minivan in a "No Parking Anytime" zone outside Redden's Funeral Home on West 14th Street, and went inside to take care of business. Sure, there was a dead body in the van, but DeNigris had slapped his "Funeral Director on Official Business" sign in the window. So you can imagine his surprise when he came back out to find the van and the corpse had vanished. We immediately thought ZOMBIE CARJACKING, but the NYPD says the van was ticketed at 9:22 a.m., and then towed nearly three hours later. Which may seem like a long time to leave a corpse behind, but hey, it wasn't as if the guy was going anywhere—or so DeNigris thought...
"The car was just gone," he tells the Daily News. And so was the corpse that was supposed to be bound for Newark Airport, then onto Miami for cremation. At the West Side tow pound, "I tried not to be too loud," DeNigris explained. "I didn't want to scream, 'I'm the guy from the funeral home with the car with the person in the back. We try to be discreet." (That's why he always leaves a corpse in an illegally parked van with tinted windows.)
The people at the tow pound were good sports and waived the $185 fee when returning the minivan, but DeNigris plans to fight the $110 parking ticket, because a funeral vehicle transporting a body is immune to parking regulations. Why do we suspect this isn't the first time DeNigris stashed a body in the back seat to score prime parking?
