‘A nightmare every day’: Inside an East Los Angeles funeral home

‘Last responders’ struggle, physically and emotionally, seeing a flood of victims

LOS ANGELES » The chapel at Continental Funeral Home was once a place where the living remembered the dead. Now the pews, chairs and furniture have been pushed aside to make room, and the dead far outnumber the living.

On a Thursday afternoon last month in Continental’s chapel in East Los Angeles, across the street from a 7-Eleven, there were four bodies in cardboard boxes.

And two bodies in open coffins, awaiting makeup.

And seven wrapped in white and pink sheets on wheeled stretchers.

And 18 in closed coffins where the pews used to be.

And 31 on the shelves of racks against the walls.

The math numbed the heart as much as the mind: 62 bodies.

Elsewhere at Continental — in the hallways beyond the chapel, in the trailers outside — there

were even more.

“I live a nightmare every day,” said Magda Maldonado, 58, owner of the funeral home. “It’s a crisis, a deep crisis. When somebody calls me, I beg them for patience. ‘Please be patient,’ I say, ‘That’s all I’m asking you.’ Because nothing is normal these days.”

Funeral homes are places America often prefers to ignore. As the coronavirus pandemic surged in Los Angeles in recent months, the industry went into disaster mode, quietly and anonymously dealing with mass death on a scale for which it was unprepared and ill-equipped. Like those in Queens and Brooklyn, New York, in the spring or South Texas in the summer, funeral homes in parts of Los Angeles have become hellish symbols of COVID-19’s toll.

Continental has been one of the most overwhelmed funeral homes in the country. Its location at the center of Southern California’s coronavirus spike, its popularity with working-class Mexican and Mexican American families who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, its decision to expand its storage capacity — all have combined to turn the day-today into a careful dance of controlled chaos. For more than six weeks, a reporter and a photographer were allowed by Maldonado, her employees and the relatives of those who died to document the inner workings of the mortuary and the heartache of funeral after funeral after funeral.

Beverly Hills has had 32 deaths. Santa Monica has had 150. East Los Angeles — an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that

PHOTO BY ALEX WELSH Magda Maldonado, owner of the Continental Funeral Home, wipes dust off a casket. She has taken part in as many as 13 funerals in a day.