Zarramen Gooden

Zarramen Gooden, only 17 when the handlebars of his old bike broke and he hit his throat, severing an artery. He had been popping wheelies near the city homeless shelter in the Bronx where he and four younger siblings lived with their heroin-addicted mother. With no funeral help from child protection authorities, his older sister scraped together $8 to buy the used suit he wore at his wake. But the funeral home swiftly sent him back to the morgue when she could not pay the $6,000 burial fee.

For the big sister of Zarramen Gooden, 17, buried on Hart Island in 1999, the reason still sears: “Did we want him in potter’s field? Hell no! We didn’t have the money. I felt so bad knowing that my brother’s body was just taken and dumped.”

Zarramen was the family clown, the lovable prankster who had known a better life. His father was a good provider, an Army veteran working two jobs as a janitor in Brooklyn, in a hospital and in a bank. But he died when the boy was 7, and the family ended up on welfare and in the drug-ravaged homeless-shelter system. Their mother, Rita Nelson, became addicted to heroin. After Zarramen’s freak bicycle accident, he bled to death on the way to the hospital.

When their mother died in 2014, the children came up with $7,000 for her burial in Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island, beside her husband. Only then did they learn that the burial plot had room for one more. Zarramen?

“They told us it was too late,” said the older sister, Malondya LaTorre.

The New York Times, by Nina Bernstein
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html

Source: The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html?_r=0>