Residents sue to stop morgue: ‘Brentwood is not a cemetery!’

Just over a year after successfully stopping a liquor store from entering their neighborhood, members of the Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association filed a lawsuit against the city to stop a multimillion-dollar coroner’s office next door.

They say they want the $62.84 million facility on North Davis Street stopped, despite being under construction for more than a year. The 18 residents are also demanding compensation in the lawsuit filed on Thursday.

Neighborhood Association President Lydia Bell pointed out that the coroner’s office is across Davis Street from the KIPP Voice Academy and directly behind what was to be a liquor store. She said residents have tried to tell city officials how much they objected, “but no one is listening; nobody listened,” she said.

“I’m just putting it in the black community,” she said during a news conference Thursday. “If he had done the traffic study, he would have stopped that on his own. But all that traffic coming around the kids? Besides, it’s morbid. Nobody wants to live around dead bodies. We are not a cemetery — Brentwood is not a cemetery. There should be no morgue in anyone’s neighborhood.”

City officials did not respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit. Association attorney Neil Henrichsen argued the city broke laws at the Brentwood building, a block off Golfair Boulevard.

“Zoning laws were violated. Work began while the property was zoned for commercial use, not public use,” Henrichsen said. “Secondly, the size of the property was over 40,000 square meters and the planning was 51,000 square meters. This was not approved when the work started.

“There has been a pattern of disregard from the city regarding the Neighborhood Bill of Rights. This is a perfect example,” he said. “No community in this town would say. “Yes, please bring a morgue to my community.”

City officials broke ground 13 months ago on the new coroner’s office, which will replace a facility whose structural bones date back to 1968.

The current facility can handle a maximum of 45 bodies, but has been at capacity several times in recent months, city documents show. The North Jefferson Street facility has also dealt with an average of 2,000 autopsies a year and is experiencing a growing number of autopsies due to opioid overdoses and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, city officials said at an inauguration in May 2023.

The new two-story medical examiner’s office, just over a mile north of the current office, is visible from nearby Interstate 95 as well as Golfair Boulevard, as well as KIPP school students and numerous homes on Davis Street and Castlewood Drive West.

The residents’ lawsuit states the facility will have space for up to 300 bodies and operate 24 hours a day and will “directly harm each resident plaintiff.” It is also “dangerous, unsightly and completely out of character” with the adjacent residential community and will decrease property values, the suit says.

What really angers Bell is that no one in her community ever knew about the chosen site until construction began. Brentwood was never on the original list of 38 sites considered in 2016 and was not selected until early 2023, she and the attorney said. Then, the city never sought a zoning exception for it until after construction began, Bell said.

“They just started building, they just started pulling trees right next to people’s houses, across the street from an elementary school — 100 feet away,” Bell said. “The laws that are already on the books must be enforced; that would stop him. But they break every law in the book and that is anarchy.”

The lawsuit comes after Brentwood spent months fighting the proposed package store on adjacent land along Golfair Boulevard.

A developer had bought the former gas station in 2019, and the Planning Commission recommended its use as a liquor store, despite vocal protests.

In September, Council member Ju’Coby Pittman told residents the city would buy the property, which is less than 200 yards from the KIPP Voice Academy. And in late March, Mayor Donna Deegan said the former liquor store would be repurposed as a small business support center.