A Staten Island family slapped the city with a lawsuit for abandoning their mother’s dead body at Bellevue Hospital, where it was mutilated by the ravages of Hurricane Sandy.
Janice, James, Venus and Calvin Lee say Juanita Lee, who died of natural causes on Oct. 28, 2012 was transported to the Kips Bay facility that same day.
But she was not evacuated during the superstorm and remained at the hospital’s morgue until Nov. 4.
The family’s attorney, Anthony Lenza, said the morgue flooded “and no one thought to preserve the bodies for the families for the mourning process. It was pretty tragic.”
The public hospital evacuated 500 patients during the hurricane and they did not return for almost a month.
The body was “mishandled and improperly dealt with” and the family was not given immediate possession of their late relative, according to the Manhattan civil suit.
Shortly after the storm the city’s hospital union, District Council 37, griped that the flooded morgue left bodies “in effect drowned, unrefrigerated and decomposing” for days.
The Lees want an unspecified sum.
A spokeswoman for the city’s Law Department did not immediately comment.