By Gabriela Resto-Montero and Mariel S. Clark
DNAinfo Staff
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS — A woman was found dead Thursday morning, her cold body slumped on a bench in a Broadway median.
Police, responding to reports of an unconscious person on the bench, made the tragic discovery at Broadway and 158th Street just after 8 a.m., the NYPD said.
"She was huddled in a cocoon," Ana Flede, whose apartment overlooks the bench, said in Spanish. "There are always a lot of car accidents around here, but never anything like this."
Police taped off the area, located in a busy intersection by a Payless Shoe Store and McDonalds, as pedestrians and traffic continued to move past the scene.
Onlookers said the woman appeared to be homeless, although police could not immediately confirm this information.
"She's probably homeless," said neighborhood resident Rafael Correa. "She had to have been feeling bad because no one's is going to sit there with this cold."
Temperatures overnight were in the high 30s but felt much colder because of the wind chill factor.
The death coincides with news reports of bed shortages in the city's homeless shelters.
On Wednesday, Legal Aid and the Coalition for the Homeless filed a lawsuit against the city saying it had failed to adequately shelter homeless men and women.
The suit said the city's shelters were over capacity and that homeless men and women have had to sleep on benches, tables and floors of intake centers, according to media reports.
“The extreme situation now is reminiscent of problems that we haven’t seen in years,” Steven Banks, the Legal Aid Society attorney in chief, told the New York Times. “It’s a failure to plan, and it’s having dire consequences for vulnerable women and vulnerable men.”
The Department of Homeless Services insisted the allegations were untrue and that people who slept at intake centers likely refused a bed or arrived too late to get a spot.
On Tuesday, Dec. 8, the date of the most recent available data, there were nearly 7,000 people staying in city shelters.
