When 75-year-old taxi driver Michael Bruno finally passed away at the end of a long and protracted battle with cancer in 2003, his family thought that they could at least console themselves with the fact that his suffering was finally over.
Yet Bruno's is now one of more than 1,000 cases being checked in a gruesome investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney's office that has shocked New York.
Like many others, his son, Vito, was shown two documents related to his father's death by police - one indicating that his father had died of a heart attack, not cancer as had been confirmed at the time, and another with his forged signature on a document granting permission to donate his father's organs.
The staggering size of the potential body count was established through a macabre investigation that tracked funeral home records and documents from companies that purchased body parts from BioMedical Tissue Services, a New Jersey company owned by former dentist Michael Mastromarino.
It is alleged that Mr Mastromarino removed skin, femurs, joints, ligaments, tendons, heart valves and teeth from bodies in at least six funeral homes under investigation and replaced bones and joints with PVC pipes and broom handles, so that relatives would be none the wiser when it came to burying their loved ones. Most of the work was apparently carried out at the Daniel George & Son funeral home in Brooklyn.
'This is absolutely the most hideous thing I have ever heard,' Vito Bruno said last week. He has filed a lawsuit for emotional distress, breach of contract and punitive damages in Brooklyn State Supreme Court.