Everybody within the park knew him. It was solely after he died that his story got here to gentle

Riverside Park runs alongside the Hudson River on New York’s Higher West Aspect. It is a neighborhood gathering place the place locals jog or stroll their canines or take part video games of pickup basketball. Regulars get to know each other, if solely by sight.

Within the winter of 2014, park regulars began noticing a person in his early 30s sitting on the identical bench daily. He was tall and muscular, with intently cropped hair and a backpack that he all the time saved by his aspect. Billy Healey, an area fowl watcher, approached him. “It was like pulling enamel to get him to say something. He was not a talker,” Healey mentioned.

Nonetheless, the person informed Healey that his title was Stephen, and that he was from Lengthy Island.

Two years glided by and Stephen sat on that park bench, in all climate and always of day. Although he mentioned little and requested for nothing, he turned well-known within the neighborhood. “It was all the time type of reassuring to see him, as a result of he was such an enormous man and so light in his presence,” mentioned Pleasure Bergmann, who would see Stephen on her day by day walks together with her canine.

Locals began bringing him small items. Bergmann would give him luggage of her magazines to look via. Healey ready plastic containers of pork ribs and potato salad for him — leftovers from household dinners — and he gave him a burgundy hoodie that Stephen wore daily.

He was sporting that hoodie when his physique was found on the morning of March 9, 2017, close to the muse of a luxurious condominium constructing by the park. Jim Littlefield, who ran safety for the constructing, was parking his automotive to return to work when he seen him. “I noticed an individual sitting down, knees bent, and his head was hunched down virtually as if in contemplative prayer,” Littlefield mentioned. At first, Littlefield thought he was sleeping. However when he noticed him once more the following morning, sitting in the identical place, he referred to as the police.

Quickly after, Pleasure Bergmann wrote an article about Stephen’s demise in an area publication, the West Aspect Rag, and it prompted an outpouring of sympathy. Neighbors constructed a makeshift memorial on the bench the place Stephen used to take a seat, with an indication that learn “Stephen Remembered,” and stuffed it with flowers and playing cards.

However regardless of the neighborhood’s fond emotions towards Stephen, nobody knew his full title or virtually something about his background. And over the following few months, the police division was unable to determine him.

Lastly, in August, 2017, Stephen’s physique was positioned in a easy pine coffin and delivered to Hart Island, a slim strip of land in Lengthy Island Sound the place New York Metropolis buries its unclaimed and unidentified useless, together with many homeless folks. There, he was stacked with dozens of others in a mass grave. The one marker was a white put up with a grave quantity: 383.

The Metropolis of New York purchased Hart Island in 1868 and commenced utilizing it as a public burial floor quickly after. Since then, greater than 1,000,000 folks have been buried there, making it America’s largest public cemetery. A lot of the interred find yourself there both as a result of their households do not declare their our bodies, or as a result of town cannot discover their subsequent of kin. Additionally they embody many stillborn infants and fetal stays. And annually a number of folks, like Stephen, cannot be recognized and are buried as John Does.

Hart Island is an uncommon cemetery in some ways. Most adults are buried in broad trenches with about 150 our bodies. The island has no headstones or plaques, solely white posts with grave numbers on them. For many of its historical past, Hart Island was managed by town’s Division of Correction, and most burials over the past a number of many years had been carried out by males incarcerated on the close by Rikers Island jail. (The usage of incarcerated burial crews resulted in 2020.)

For years, details about people buried on Hart Island was very troublesome to entry. However in 2008, following a Freedom of Info Legislation request, town began releasing Hart Island’s burial ledgers from 1980 onward to visible artist Melinda Hunt, who runs a nonprofit group referred to as The Hart Island Mission. Hunt has spent many years documenting Hart Island and advocating for larger transparency round its burials. The Hart Island Mission has used the burial data to construct a web based database with names and details about the useless, which incorporates areas for family members to jot down notes and remembrances.

Hart Island is commonly regarded as a spot the place folks find yourself once they’ve been forgotten by household and mates, however the notes within the Hart Island Mission database reveal a extra sophisticated actuality. They inform tales of conflicts, addictions and psychological sicknesses that led relations to turn into estranged or out of contact. They reveal institutional failures, like cursory police investigations that left our bodies unidentified, or easy lack of oversight that allowed our bodies to be despatched to Hart Island by mistake after they had been donated to science.

Radio Diaries’ new sequence, The Unmarked Graveyard, explores these themes via the tales of some people buried on the island, the lives they lived, and the folks they left behind. One will observe a girl who determined to trace down the daddy she by no means knew, solely to be taught that he was one of many many individuals who had been buried on the island on the peak of the AIDS epidemic. One other will examine what occurred to a person who was estranged from his household for many years.

The sequence commemorates an writer whose physique ended up on the island with out her household’s data, and items collectively the lifetime of a girl who lived alone in a Manhattan resort. It is going to study what went flawed in an outdated lacking individuals case that prompted laws in New York State, and contemplate one man’s resolution to be buried on Hart Island, a spot most individuals do not find yourself by alternative. And it’ll uncover the backstory of Stephen, the homeless man who died in Riverside Park.

The sequence comes at a time when Hart Island itself is changing into extra accessible than it has been in many years. The island’s gravesites had been virtually fully off limits to the general public, together with most relations of the useless, till 2015. Since then, in response to a category motion lawsuit, relations and shut mates have been ready to join visits the place they’re ferried to the island and escorted by guards to the graves of their family members. Visits are at the moment restricted to about two dates per thirty days.

In 2021, town transferred management of the island from the Division of Correction to its Parks Division, which lately introduced that it might open the island to most of the people. That is anticipated to occur someday this 12 months.

Greater than a 12 months after Stephen’s demise, an area journalist named Jessica Brockington was scrolling via a database of lacking individuals when she chanced on a well-recognized face.

Brockington had seen Stephen for years whereas strolling her two canines in Riverside Park. Their interactions had been temporary. Her canines would run beneath his ft typically, and Stephen favored to pet them. As soon as, on a bitterly chilly winter day, she had purchased him espresso and soup. Although she did not know him properly, she felt unhappy that he had died.

That day, as she was scrolling via the database, she acknowledged Stephen’s picture instantly. However subsequent to the picture was a reputation she did not acknowledge: Neil Harris Jr.

Brockington began Googling the title, and he or she discovered a Fb web page the place, each Monday, a girl named Susan Hurlburt was posting a lacking individuals flier with pleading notes: “Nonetheless lacking, nonetheless praying. I will by no means hand over on you,” or, “Assist me find my son. I will by no means hand over on you, Neil.”

“I am fully obsessive about it at that time,” mentioned Brockington. She suspected the New York Metropolis Police Division may need details about the person within the park that might assist Hurlburt. However when Brockington reached the detective who’d been assigned to look into the person’s identification, she says he informed her he did not assume Stephen and Neil had been the identical individual.

So Brockington reached out to the Conscious Basis, which was serving to Hurlburt put out lacking individuals fliers, and the following day she and Hurlburt had been on the cellphone.

Susan Hurlburt has a hat field the place she retains memorabilia from her son’s childhood. Inside there are child footwear and a lock of hair from Neil’s first haircut, and a photograph of his father. “Neil’s father and I sadly had been only a one evening stand,” Hurlburt mentioned. “However, issues occur. And Neil occurred.”

Hurlburt raised Neil in Inwood, Lengthy Island, as a single mom, and so they had been shut. She nonetheless has a letter he wrote to her as a part of an elementary college task: “My hero is my mother as a result of she has all the time been there for me… I keep in mind once we did not have a house or any cash and we had been residing with my aunt. After some time she obtained a job and we obtained a house. And that is why my mother is my hero.”

Hurlburt remembers Neil as a enjoyable, cuddly little one who liked canines a lot that the household referred to as him Dr. Dolittle. However as he grew up, he began exhibiting indicators of great psychological sickness. He turned quiet and withdrawn, and began talking with what he believed to be ghosts. As soon as, he accused Hurlburt of making an attempt to poison him, and pushed her. “I went flying throughout the room,” she mentioned.

After a sequence of incidents, Neil was hospitalized on the age of 29, and Hurlburt says the physician recognized him with schizophrenia and prescribed medicine. After a brief keep, although, Hurlburt says Neil needed to cease the medicine and be launched.

Hurlburt and Neil moved with relations to upstate New York. However Neil wasn’t comfortable in regards to the transfer. In the future, he requested Hurlburt to convey him to the Inwood prepare station, the place he deliberate to sleep on the platform. She did what he requested, frightened he’d get violent if she refused.

“I felt helpless,” Hurlburt remembers. “After we pulled into the parking zone of the Inwood prepare station, he simply obtained out, took his little backpack, threw it over his shoulder, walked away. By no means appeared behind.”

Hurlburt determined to go to the prepare station as soon as every week to provide Neil meals and cash, and the primary time she went, she says Neil took the cash and walked away. However the subsequent time, he wasn’t there.

Hurlburt reported Neil lacking and began placing out notices on social media. However greater than three years handed, and he or she heard nothing.

When Brockington and Hurlburt spoke, their first, painful process was to substantiate whether or not Stephen and Neil had been the identical individual. Brockington started by telling Hurlburt about Stephen’s habits within the park — how quiet he was, and the way he’d linked together with her canines.

“And I am like, that is gotta be Neil,” Hurlburt mentioned. “After which I am, like, arguing inside my very own head. Saying no, no, no — after which saying perhaps, perhaps — no, no, no, no, no.”

Brockington despatched her the medical expert’s picture of Stephen from his post-mortem. Although he appeared extra matted than she remembered, Hurlburt acknowledged him instantly. A DNA take a look at quickly confirmed the match, and Hurlburt obtained Neil’s demise certificates. He had died of an untreated ulcer.

When Hurlburt discovered that Neil was buried on Hart Island, the concept of his physique being stacked in a mass grave upset her. She thought-about having him exhumed and buried elsewhere.

Then she modified her thoughts. She knew that Neil’s father, Neil Harris Sr., was buried on Hart Island as properly. He had died many years earlier, additionally in his thirties, when Neil Jr. was 9. Hurlburt says her son all the time needed to have a relationship together with his father and to go to his grave. Now, in demise, she mentioned, “my hope is that they are collectively now and so they’re growing a relationship and so they’re hanging out someplace collectively.”

When she visited Hart Island for the primary time in April 2023, Hurlburt was struck by the bodily fantastic thing about the island. Like Riverside Park, it was stuffed with timber, and Neil’s gravesite overlooks the water. “It is a very quiet, serene spot,” she mentioned as she surveyed the scene. “And that was Neil. He was very quiet in life. So, yeah. That is the place he’ll stay.”

Studying what had occurred to her son sparked sophisticated feelings. Hurlburt was grateful to the individuals who had taken care of Neil within the park, and who had tracked her all the way down to let her know what turned of him. However she did not really feel the sense of closure many individuals anticipated.

“There isn’t any closure,” she mentioned. “I do not perceive what folks assume once they say, ‘Nicely, at the least now you understand.’ I would reasonably not know. I would reasonably carry on trying.”

This story was produced by Alissa Escarce of Radio Diaries. It was edited by Joe Richman, Deborah George, and Ben Shapiro. Particular due to Jessica Brockington, who shared analysis and audio recordings from her seek for Neil Harris Jr.’s household, and to filmmaker Eric Spink of Vacant Mild, who shared his recording of Neil’s memorial.

Thanks additionally to Nellie Gilles, Mycah Hazel, and Lena Engelstein of Radio Diaries.

This story is the primary in a sequence referred to as The Unmarked Graveyard: Tales from Hart Island. Yow will discover an extended model of the story, and different tales about Hart Island, on the Radio Diaries Podcast.