The procession of priests entered the church dressed in ornate robes amid wafting incense and the ethereal sounds of a choir and a mammoth organ rendering a requiem Mass in Latin.
It could have been just another All Souls’ Day mass at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan last Monday, but there was an unusual addition: nine metal urns placed amid bouquets of flowers near the altar.
The Rev. Mark Schultz took the pulpit and explained that the urns contained the remains of “nine unhoused New Yorkers who died in the bitter winter of 2025 and 2026.”
The nine — eight men and one woman — died on the streets, he said, “with no friends or family to come forward to claim them, even in death.”
They were among at least 18 New Yorkers who died after exposure to the cold outside during some of the most brutally frigid weather the city had seen in decades. They were found cold and alone in doorways, encampments and open sidewalks.
Father Schultz slowly listed the nine names along with the few details gleaned from a form issued by the New York City medical examiner’s office.
There was Manjeet Singh, 38, an Indian immigrant who was found dead along the Van Wyck Expressway, the priest told the congregation of about 200.
Igor Zapevalov, 64, a Russian immigrant, was found dead in a doorway on East Seventh Street.
Also on the grim list: Edward Adames, 54; Harold Hemphill, 66; and Tomeka Gibson, 39; all found in Manhattan. And Jeffrey Costa, 47, and Jose Pena, 74, found in Queens. Jorge Elias Rivera Torres, 61, was found in Brooklyn, and James Paul Smith, 51, in the Bronx.
“We know little of these nine neighbors, but we do know this,” Father Schultz said. “They are beloved.”
In the front pew, head bowed, was Rhonda Roland Shearer, a Manhattan artist whose nonprofit, the Community Burial Project, helps arrange private interments for the unclaimed bodies of homeless New Yorkers. It was Ms. Shearer who spearheaded the mission to honor these nine people who died cold and alone.
When unclaimed bodies are found in New York City, it falls to the medical examiner’s office to try to reach next of kin. Even if the identity is known, as it was for all nine of these decedents, staff members may spend months scouring databases and government records.
While identification methods have vastly improved, with advanced computer searches and fingerprinting techniques, hundreds of bodies still go unclaimed each year in New York City. Most are buried in communal graves on Hart Island, off the coast of the Bronx, where the city maintained a potter’s field since the 1800s.
Every year, roughly 2,000 people are buried on Hart Island. There, bodies in pine boxes are stacked upon one other in trenches with no headstones. To Ms. Shearer, burying the nine bodies in a mass grave on “the Island of Lost Souls,” as Hart Island has been called, would be a shameful ending to an already sad story.
“I just wanted them to have the dignity that every human deserves,” she said.
Over the years, Ms. Shearer said, her group has claimed several unclaimed bodies for private burials, which the medical examiner may allow if, after a period of searching, no family or close contacts are found to claim the remains and if a licensed funeral director handles the bodies.
After seeing news reports last winter about the deaths, Ms. Shearer contacted the examiner’s office to see if any of the 18 people had no family to bury them.
“I wondered if one or two might go unclaimed,” she recalled. “It turned out to be nine.”
She reached out to Patrick Marmo, who owns nine funeral homes in New York City. He agreed to a heavily discounted rate, picked up the bodies in May and had them cremated.
Ms. Shearer has cultivated a sizable network of donors and partners to help with her relief work, which has included providing equipment at the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and during the coronavirus pandemic. She is in regular contact with Housing Works, a nonprofit that helps the homeless and people living with AIDS, which worked with her on the burial project.
The author Amy Tan, a friend and neighbor in SoHo, donated $7,500 to help cover the cost of the cremations and the urns.
“When I heard about these names,” Ms. Tan said this week, “I read each one of them aloud, and I imagined every single one of them — alone, unloved, frozen to death.”
“My whole community stepped up,” said Ms. Shearer, whose burial project is part of the Art Science Research Laboratory, a nonprofit that she started in 1998 with her husband, the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002.
The cold snap posed an early challenge to the newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
“It was painful for everyone to keep reading about these deaths,” Ms. Shearer said. “But I have confidence the city will do the right thing this year.”
On Monday, Mr. Mamdani is to announce a sweeping, citywide mobilization to prepare New York City for winter weather, including an expanded Code Blue system that will put more homeless-outreach teams and warming sites around the city, along with dozens of mobile units staffed with a registered nurse or nurse practitioner to provide medical support and transportation to warming centers, medical facilities and other warm locations.
For the burials, probably the most expensive part of the process, Ms. Shearer, a member of St. Thomas, asked Father Schultz if the church would donate nine spaces for the interments.
This might seem a surprising church to ask. After all, St. Thomas, which occupies prime Manhattan real estate on Fifth Avenue, has its share of wealthy congregants and a sizable endowment.
But Father Schultz did not hesitate.
“It was an immediate yes,” she said. In addition, the church decided to honor them at the All Souls’ Day Mass. “It’s notable that these nine people who were abandoned are being remembered and honored as valuable humans by this historic church,” she said.
Melinda Hunt, the founder of the nonprofit Hart Island Project, called all these efforts laudable but said that problems could arise if any relatives showed up, even years later, to claim their loved one.
In addition, she said, there was no indication that any of the nine New Yorkers were Episcopalian or would be opposed to being buried on Hart Island, which she called a natural burial in a city park.
The city does not cremate unclaimed bodies because of state public health laws that honor religious preference. Additionally, one purpose of burying bodies on Hart Island is to allow for the possibility that relatives may later appear and choose to disinter the body for a private burial.
Still, Ms. Shearer responded, “It’s a choice between being named and remembered in a beautiful Fifth Avenue church or being stacked four-coffins high in an unmarked mass grave.”
The Mass last Monday concluded with Father Schultz blessing the urns with incense and handing them to a series of pallbearers. As the choir sang “In Paradisum,” they solemnly carried them into the adjacent sanctuary for inurnment.
In his remembrance, the Rev. Charles King, an ordained minister who is the co-founder and chief executive of Housing Works, thanked the church for “embracing these nine souls and making them a part of your community.”
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