The skeletal remains of a reclusive elderly woman, fully clothed as if she’d been about to go out, were found in her Brooklyn home yesterday – two years to the month since neighbors last reported seeing her.
Christina Copeman, 70, was found lying on her side in the second-floor hallway of the three-story building she owned on East 92nd Street in East Flatbush.
Her nephew, Peter Bishop, said she was wearing a heavy coat, a hat and a scarf.
Altea Bishop said she believed her sister had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
“She kept to herself, like a hermit,” she said. “She didn’t bother her neighbors. She wouldn’t answer the door.”
An employee at the city Medical Examiner’s Office said the body had decayed to the point where Copeman was mostly bone.
“She was past decomposing; she was totally gone,” the city worker said. “She’d been dead a long time. It wasn’t gruesome; it was just sad.”
Neighbors said they last saw Copeman alive in December 2005 – and they claimed that they called 311 and 911 numerous times, but that nothing happened.
Peter Bishop, 35, a Staten Island limo driver, said he finally filed a missing-person report after failing to get results from calling the cops, calling his aunt, and knocking on Copeman’s door.
“We called the police all the time,” he said. “They would come, but they wouldn’t do anything.”
Yesterday, the police – this time, armed with the missing-person report – forced open the door to Copeman’s home and came across her body.
They also found a 4-foot-high stack of mail.
Last February, the city Buildings Department received a complaint that there had been no activity in the house for 14 months, that a leak from there was seeping into the building next door, and that the roof needed repairs.
In April, a building inspector cited the roof as being in violation of city code and noted the house was not being properly maintained.
But that inspector never actually entered the home, a department spokesman said yesterday.
Neighbors said that after her husband, Joseph, died 17 years ago, Copeman left her job at Chase bank and turned into a recluse, often not even answering the door when they sought to visit.
“She became very strange,” said Ruby Fulmer, 92. “She never talked to anybody” after her husband’s death.
A spokesman for the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which runs the 311 system, said there was no record of calls concerning Copeman but that the callers may have been transferred to other departments.
An autopsy was to be conducted today.