Mayor's Absence at Tragic Funeral Raises Eyebrows: What Was Missing?
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani was a no-show at the Monday funeral for nine homeless New Yorkers who froze to death during last winter’s deep freeze that proved to be hizzoner’s first big test at City Hall.
Mamdani, who faced heat for his handling of the Big Apple’s outdoor homeless population during the brutal cold snap, skipped the service at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue that honored the unclaimed bodies.
“Now we know little of these nine neighbors, but we do know this – they are beloved,” Reverend Mark Schultz intoned at the service.
“We speak the truth of their dignity,” said Schultz.
Arrangements for Monday’s service, for nine of the 18 homeless people found dead outside last winter, were cobbled together by a handful of good Samaritans.
Rhonda Roland Shearer, a nonprofit founder who helped plan the funeral, said she hopes the service “will make everybody alert to prevent this again.”
The team saved the remains from being buried on Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field off the coast of the Bronx, in order to give the sadly perished group a proper goodbye.
Noticeably absent from the All Souls Day Mass was Mamdani, who faced calls during last winter’s bone-chilling temps to force the city’s homeless indoors to safety and warmth.
While imploring New Yorkers to “come inside,” the mayor also stubbornly stuck to a position of using involuntary removals of homeless people from the cold only as a “last resort.”
Critics also took aim at the administration’s bungled rollout of the city’s mobile warming centers, which were difficult to track down and often not where they were supposed to be.
“He knows this is coming and more deaths are coming unless he changes his approach,” the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gellas Gelinas told The Post at the time.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
