A grim subway reality: Corpses sometimes kept in break rooms

It’s a largely overlooked but gory reality of the New York City subway system: When someone takes their life by jumping in front of a train, police need to find a place to put the mutilated body until a medical examiner truck arrives.

Sometimes, transit workers said, that place is their break room or bathrooms. And naturally, they don’t like it. Some say they have been traumatized by unexpectedly coming upon a stowed body.

“The subway isn’t supposed to be New York City’s temporary morgue,” said John Samuelsen, president of Transport Workers Union International.

In one of the latest cases Wednesday, the body of a man found on a Manhat- tan subway train after he apparently died of natural causes was bagged and stashed in an out- of- service employee bathroom.

Authorities had no immediate word on how long the man’s body was there. But station agents claim it can take hours before bodies are moved from employees- only areas, increasing the odds they’ll stumble upon them, TWU Local 100 representative Derick Echevarria said.

Workers have been “surprised and shocked by this,” Echevarria said. “These are places where people take breaks, eat food, store their clothes.”

The union has received about a dozen complaints in the past year, including some alleging workers were exposed to messy remains, union officials said. Local 100 raised the is- sue with the Metropolitan Transit Authority twice in the same period, they add, but the complaints go back years.

The MTA and the New York Police Department don’t deny workers have occasionally encountered the body bags. But they deny suggestions that it’s the result of an increase in suicides in the subways or longer response times by the medical examiner’s office.

The annual number of deaths of all kinds in the subways has held steady — there were about 50 last year — in an era of record ridership. And authorities said the average medical examiner response times are actually down so far this year by a half hour compared to the same period last year. It now takes slightly less than two hours.