Indeed, among the privately donated cadavers that N.Y.U. dispatched to Hart Island was the body of Leo Van Witsen, the author of an influential book on costume design for opera, who had actually donated his corpse to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.
According to N.Y.U.’s records, Columbia’s program did not need Mr. Van Witsen’s body when he died at 96 in 2009, in the apartment on West 73rd Street in Manhattan that he and his partner had shared for decades. So with permission from the executor of his will, Columbia transferred his body to N.Y.U., Ms. Greiner said. Three years later, apparently because his executor had checked off a box on an N.Y.U. form stating that the family did not want the remains returned, the school sent Mr. Van Witsen’s corpse to a city morgue as unclaimed instead of cremating it.
“He deserved something much better than that, even if it was scattering his ashes in Central Park,” said Sharon Stein, a former neighbor who described Mr. Van Witsen as “thorny, interesting and dapper,” and recalled that he had escaped the Holocaust as a refugee from the Netherlands in 1938.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/nyregion/bodies-given-to-nyu-ended-up-in-mass-graves-despite-donors-wishes.html?_r=0
