mm:ss 00:00 THIS IS HART ISLAND, where New York City’s unclaimed dead have been buried since 1869. Each year, about 1,500 bodies are ferried from the city’s morgues to this uninhabited strip of land near the Bronx. Inmates from nearby Rikers Island can earn 50 cents an hour stacking coffins three deep in 70-foot-long trenches. Under a New York State law, relatives can have as little as 48 hours after a death to claim a body for burial. 00:36 Some families are given no notice at all. At the end of 2015 22 bodies slated for burial on Hart Island remained in cold storage at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. The city’s medical examiner’s office had loaned the bodies as medical cadavers — without the consent of the deceased or their families. 01:00 One of these bodies was that of Bruce Hanson. BRUCE HANSON’s unclaimed body remained in storage after his death in 2013. His family was not notified of his death until several months after his burial on March 10, 2016. All along, his estranged daughter has been searching for him. 01:33 LORRAINE ARUTT’s body was stored for nearly a year and a half. The medical examiner’s office repeatedly told Ms. Arutt’s family that she already had been buried on Hart Island. After several bureaucratic setbacks, Ms. Arutt was buried by her family in a private ceremony — nearly two years after her death. 02:00 The other 20 cadavers were buried on Hart Island in February and March 2016. (END CREDITS)