The call came in at shortly after 11 a.m. on Wednesday: A terrible stench was coming from a pair of trucks parked outside a funeral home on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.

When the police arrived, they made a gruesome discovery. Inside the trucks — a U-Haul rental and what seemed to be a tractor-trailer — were several dozen decomposing bodies.

The New York State Department of Health, which regulates funeral homes, was also called to the scene, in the borough’s Flatlands section, to determine whether the funeral home was handling the remains appropriately, and it issued two summonses, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.

The spectacle of dead New Yorkers left to decay in broad daylight in rental trucks on a crowded street in Brooklyn underscored the scale of challenge facing the city as it tries to absorb the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. More than 17,000 people in New York City have died so far from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.