Two Dead Men and an Elementary School

A new investigation today into a ramshackle Brooklyn school and homeless shelter run by two rabbis who served brief prison stints for defrauding a federal program that provides lunches to needy school kids.

Just after midnight at an Orthodox Jewish elementary school in Brooklyn, Elliott Gordon found a man turning blue on the floor of the chapel.

Gordon had been sitting in a filthy dormitory room upstairs when he heard a voice in the hallway say that a man named Moshe had collapsed. It was Gordon’s first night at the school, where he was paying $150 a week to stay in a room stuffed with three beds. He had found two glasses of urine on the windowsill of the shared bedroom when he moved in that afternoon.

Gordon grabbed his phone and ran downstairs to investigate. Moshe was on his face in the tumbledown sanctuary, his body limp. Gordon called 911.

While EMTs worked to revive Moshe, another adult resident of the elementary school told Gordon that Moshe had a history of heroin addiction and had been passed out on the floor of the synagogue for nearly two hours. Gordon, unsettled, returned to bed, only to be woken again just after 6 a.m., when he heard more EMTs rushing through the halls.

Later, Gordon learned that two men had been taken to the hospital from the school building during the early hours of October 16: Moshe, who was in his 40s, and an 80-year-old man named Allan Shapiro, who police say suffered cardiac arrest. Both men had died.

“You’re talking two deaths at the same location within five hours,” Gordon said. “I said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”

Read the rest here.