Man buried in NYC paupers grave after hospitals careless error left loved ones unable to find him: suit
They made a grave error.A desperate woman spent more than a year searching for her missing brother who vanished in NYC –only to find out he had died and was buried in a pauper’s grave because “careless” hospital workers misspelled his name by one wrong letter, according to a lawsuit.Staff at Manhattan’s Mt.Sinai West hospital bungled the spelling of 50-year-old Robert Maguire’s name on official paperwork, the suit alleges.
According to city records, the letter “g” was changed to a “q” and wrongly rendering it on the documents as “Maquire.” Because of the small but consequential error, the filing claims no family was able to be found for the 50-year-old, down-on-his-luck welder after he went missing during a brief, 2025 layover at at Midtown’s Port Authority Bus Terminal while on a trip to Pennsylvania.With no next of kin, the city treated Maguire as an unclaimed “John Doe” and kept his body in a cold morgue for months before burying him on Hart Island that May — all without his family’s knowledge or consent, the suit says.“Due to the defendants’ failures to search or failure to search properly and misspelling the decedent’s last name, the decedent was instead caused to be buried on Hart Island,” the suit alleges.After Maguire went missing, his desperate family searched relentlessly for him, but because of the paperwork spelling error, their searches turned up empty, the suit claims.That means the family never knew that after arriving at Port Authority during his NYC layover, he fell ill and was admitted to Mt.Sinai West on January 13, 2025 — where he died two days later, according to the lawsuit.When he was admitted, he was carrying proper ID and the hospital correctly recording his date of birth — but at some point staff took his name down wrong, the family claims.According to the city’s Hart Island lookup tool, he was registered as “Maquire.”The simple mistake left his family — including sister Kathy Troutma...