The badly decomposed body of an 84-year-old man was found in the trash-filled Brooklyn apartment he shared with his wife — who had planned to wait a year before calling authorities, police said Monday.
Brent Shapiro died of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease at least two months ago but his 72-year-old wife did not call 911, police said.
Cops showed up at the home at 7 p.m. Saturday after the couple’s worried sons, ages 45 and 41, called 911 asking police to check in on their parents, whom they described as mentally ill.
The sons had not seen the parents since 2019, police said.
The apartment was so full of clutter and trash cops had to use the fire escape to get inside the third-floor bedroom, where they found Shapiro’s body about two hours after arriving on the scene.
“Floor to ceiling, classic hoarder situation,” a police source said. “Feces, all sorts of debris. He was found on a pile of garbage.”
Elizabeth Shapiro was taken to a hospital for psychiatric observation.
While garbage accumulated inside their home on Coney Island Ave. near Glenwood Road in Midwood, the wife meticulously swept the sidewalk outside the building, clearing it of snow, trash and pigeon droppings.
“She used to sit outside and clean the street because the pigeons pooped. She sat outside and ate ice cream in the summer,” said a neighbor, who would not give his name. She occasionally “cleaned up snow and garbage in the front,” he added.
She told cops she had planned to wait a year before notifying authorities her husband had died, the police source said.
She rarely talked about her husband, even to employees of a medical office where he was a patient, according to two workers there who would not give their names. And the wheelchair-bound man was rarely seen.
They said they thought nothing of it because the couple lived on the upper floor and it would be difficult for the wife to get him out of the building.
They too said the wife was “always cleaning the outside of the building.”
“It’s tough for someone to live in that situation, and with a dead body,” said a neighbor. “I don’t know what she was going through.”
