How an Inquirer photographer found a grim scene at Philly’s medical examiner’s office

For more than a week, Inquirer staff photographer Elizabeth Robertson had been driving by the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, checking for activity around several refrigerated trailers set up as overflow morgue space.

With coronavirus deaths rising and funeral homes overwhelmed, the mere presence of the trailers made for a grim scene. But that didn’t prepare Robertson for what she saw on a recent Sunday afternoon when, shortly after she arrived, a dark pickup sped into the parking lot with a black mat covering the truck bed.

As several city workers looked on, the truck’s driver got out, climbed into the back, and tossed off the mat along with several other coverings, including what appeared to be a roll of carpet. Under his feet were five or six bulky white bundles.

They were body bags.

“I was shaking. I kind of couldn't believe it,” Robertson said.

A 33-year veteran of The Inquirer, Robertson has seen her fair share of dead bodies and covered countless tragedies, including the Virginia Tech shootings. But she was stunned.

“I felt like someone kicked me in the stomach.” she said. “He was just walking on the people.”

She continued photographing as the man pulled one corpse at a time onto a gurney. The city workers — who also appeared surprised but were very respectful, Robertson noted — strapped in each one and wheeled it into a refrigerated trailer already filled with other bodies. The entire drop-off lasted less than 30 minutes.

Her instinct told her something wasn’t right, but Robertson had a lot of questions, too. Who was the man driving the truck? Why were the bodies lying in the back of a pickup? Were they coronavirus victims?

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Rather than push for the pictures to be published right away, she alerted The Inquirer’s photo editors, as well as top editor Gabriel Escobar, to determine what additional reporting was necessary.

“We were hypersensitive about running photos of dead people,” Escobar said. “We needed to understand fully what this was.”

Still, the news value of the pictures was immediately clear to him. “It was the proof that the system was taxed,” he said. “You don’t set up trucks outside the morgue in advance without a reason.”

Robertson, it turned out, had captured an important clue. Several of the images, when viewed at full resolution, showed hand-scrawled labels indicating the bodies were from Einstein Medical Center.

After a reporter’s inquiries, the hospital issued an apology and blamed a funeral home contractor for mistreating the corpses. (The causes of death and the contractor’s identity remain unclear, although Einstein later said it terminated its contract with the funeral home.) The Medical Examiner’s Office condemned the “unapproved” means of transferring remains.

The Inquirer was able to publish the photos with a story about the incident a day after it occurred.

“Philly can be rough ... but we do have more love than putting a bunch of bodies in a truck,” Robertson said.

But when she still sees people walking around without masks or not physically distancing, she wonders what more she can do as a photojournalist.

“What are we not doing to illustrate how real this is?” she asked, referring to the coronavirus pandemic. “How do we illustrate the fact that there’s all of this loss?”

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