Sealed apartment where body of 92-year-old NYC woman with dementia was found feared a horror show
A 92-year-old woman with dementia and her nephew’s caretaker each suffered cruel, tragic ends — dying within feet of each other in her two-bedroom Upper West Side pad some neighbors feared has now become a “horror show.”Alice Osman spent her life traveling the world before dementia made her a prisoner in her own mind, dying alone in her co-op, with the body of her haunted, struggling nephew Steven Osman in the next room.Both Osmans were found dead inside her ground-floor home at 370 Riverside Dr.
in June, according to relatives, court papers, and officials.Osman, 92, graduated Teachers College in 1959 and taught English to non-native speakers, working at Columbia University’s American Language Program in 1969, the school and another nephew, Mark Osman, said.“She was a world traveler,” Mark Osman told The Post.
“I think that’s one of the reasons she never got married because she liked to travel the world.I’ve seen pictures of her riding a camel, visiting different continents.
She loved going to places that didn’t speak English.”The elder Osman “lucked out,” landing her two-bedroom, roughly 1,500-square-foot pad at 370 Riverside Dr.decades ago, using it as her home base and at times, hosting younger relatives, Mark Osman said.Similar apartments now sell for $1 million or more, records show.
She often flew by herself to her Lake Worth, Fla., condo just south of West Palm Beach, he added.Her family didn’t realize Alice was struggling until she started getting lost in her longtime neighborhood and fell a year behind on her monthly maintenance charges, her nephew said.That’s when Mark’s brother Steven, 63, a former lawyer who was also struggling with drug and alcohol addiction and was tormented by the death of his best friend — NYPD Officer John Perry, who perished trying to rescue people in the Sept.
11, 2001 terror attacks — stepped in.The pair lived together, but Steven’s unwelcome penchant for collecting and storing cans ...