SYRACUSE, N.Y. - A Syracuse funeral director says Van Duyn nursing home did not keep its morgue cool enough to prevent a deceased resident's body from decomposing.

Patty Knight Scholl, of Keegan-Osbelt-Knight funeral home, said when a colleague went to Van Duyn to pick up the body Saturday it was badly decomposed because of a malfunctioning cooler.

She has filed a complaint against Van Duyn with the state Health Department.

"I've never had something happen like this in the 28 years I've been a funeral director," Scholl said. "It's upsetting."

Van Duyn officials did not return phone messages from syracuse.com. In a prepared statement, the state Health Department said it "takes nursing home complaints like this one seriously."

Scholl alerted other Central New York funeral directors to the problem in a letter she sent out today.

"The condition of the decedent was horrendous," she said in the letter. "The patients at Van Duyn deserve to be treated with some respect both in life and death."

Scholl said the man died Thursday, March 15, and she was contacted the next day by his family who wanted him cremated. She said Van Duyn called her Friday and Saturday, demanding she come get the body because it had limited cooler space. She said it did not make sense to remove him from the cooler because he could not be cremated until Monday. She said her funeral home and most others do not have have coolers.

Most nursing homes do not have morgues and rely on funeral directors to pick up deceased residents shortly after death, she said. She said the temperature in coolers where bodies are stored is supposed to be kept between 37 and 40 degrees.

Scholl said another funeral director told her he noticed a problem with the morgue temperature at Van Duyn March 10 and told nursing home staff they needed to get it fixed.

Scholl said the deceased resident's family did not want to publicly comment on the case.

"They just want to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else," she said. "It's horrifying this had to happen."

Van Duyn is a 530-bed nursing home owned by Upstate Services Group, a for-profit company that bought it from Onondaga County in 2013.

Van Duyn recently replaced its administrator in the wake of patient complaints about lack of heat and other problems at the facility.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rates Van Duyn "much below average" based on health inspections, staffing and quality measures.

Between Feb. 1, 2014 and Jan. 31, the state Health Department received 133.1 complaints per 100 residents at Van Duyn. That's nearly three times higher than the state average of 46 complaints per 100 residents.

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