She checked burial services and the yellow pages. And she even went to the city archives to find the exact place her baby was taken. But nothing helped. Baby Tamika's burial records had just completely disappeared, like banished just into thin air. It would be a long time before Elaine would be able to get any type of closure. Not long after Elaine went through all of this heartbreak, the city experienced another major epidemic. In 1981, AIDS hit New York City and it was a very similar story. Now we dedicated an entire episode to the AIDS epidemic in season one. So if you want more in depth information, definitely highly recommend you go give that a listen. But the height of the AIDS epidemic was between 1981 to 1990. And New York was the city most affected by HIV, specifically the LGBTQ plus communities. And when researchers pinpointed that the virus seemed to be spreading the quickest in communities of gay men, they were like pushed out from society. The gay community, which had already been experiencing judgment, abuse, and just in general being treated poorly, were now fighting a deadly virus, essentially on their own. And other New Yorkers were so scared of them and catching whatever they had, because there was really no understanding of what AIDS was. So when people died of AIDS, even the coroners and morticians didn't want to touch them. And worse, many didn't even want people who had died of AIDS to be buried in a traditional cemetery with their family because of this stigma. So they turned to the one place they knew they could bury people no matter what. Heart Island. The first documented burial on Heart Island of people who died of complications from AIDS happened in 1985. Normally, there would be a shallow grave where more than 100 adults would be buried, but this was not the case for those who died of AIDS. They were buried at the furthest possible point in the island, away and quarantined from all the other bodies. I guess they were concerned the bodies would still somehow be contagious. So they were buried in individual graves, 14 feet deep, in lead-lined coffins. As the years went on and more became known about AIDS, the city started burying people who died of AIDS-related complications with everyone else in those mass graves.