Police say the 89-year-old had lived for months without heat or running water on the same property where her son stayed in a nearby residence.
CARLISLE, N.Y. — A 64-year-old Schoharie County man has been charged after New York State Police said they found his 89-year-old mother dead in a shed on family property where she had been living without heat or running water.
The arrest, announced Thursday, came more than a year after Nancy Polizzi’s body was found on Feb. 23, 2025, and turned what began as an unattended-death call into a homicide case centered on elder neglect. Authorities say Joseph Polizzi was his mother’s primary caregiver in the weeks before her death, when she could no longer walk, feed herself or speak, and they accuse him of failing to get her medical care.
Troopers said they were sent to a property on Polizzi Road after what the agency called “a report of an unattended death.” There, police found Nancy Polizzi dead inside a shed. As investigators reconstructed the months before her death, they concluded she had been living in the outbuilding since August 2024, even though it had no running water or heat. The next day, Feb. 24, 2025, Dr. Bernard Ng performed an autopsy at Ellis Hospital and later ruled the manner of death a homicide, according to the state police release. For more than 13 months after that, the case remained largely out of public view. Then, on April 16, 2026, troopers arrested Joseph Polizzi at his home on the same property, took him to State Police in Cobleskill for processing and then brought him to the Schoharie County Centralized Arraignment Part Court.
Police said the autopsy found that Nancy Polizzi died from sepsis caused by untreated gangrenous decubitus ulceration, the medical term used in the release for severe bedsores. Investigators also said Joseph Polizzi lived in a separate residence on the property and was serving as his mother’s primary caretaker as her condition worsened. In the weeks before she died, police said, she was “unable to walk, feed herself, or speak.” Authorities allege he did not provide adequate medical care or seek needed treatment. The release and matching local reports do not answer several central questions, including who called police to the property, how long her sores had gone untreated, whether any home health or adult services agency had previously been involved, or when she was last seen by a doctor. Those unanswered details are likely to shape how prosecutors present the case as it moves beyond the arrest stage.
Carlisle is a rural town in Schoharie County with about 1,500 residents, and the county lies west of Albany. In that setting, the physical details in the police account carry unusual weight. The shed where Nancy Polizzi was found had no heat or running water, and February in the Albany area normally brings daytime highs around 36 degrees and nighttime lows near 18, along with an average 13.7 inches of snow, according to National Weather Service climate normals. State officials say elder abuse and neglect remain a large, undercounted problem: New York’s Office for the Aging estimates that 300,000 older New Yorkers are victimized each year. Federal patient-safety guidance also treats pressure ulcers as a serious medical danger because they can lead to infection and higher mortality. None of that proves what happened in Carlisle by itself, but it helps explain why investigators treated the combination of immobility, untreated sores and a utility-free outbuilding as more than a medical tragedy.
The criminal case now turns on two New York felonies with different legal theories. Under state penal law, first-degree endangering the welfare of a vulnerable elderly person applies when a caregiver recklessly causes serious physical injury to a vulnerable elderly person; it is a class D felony. Criminally negligent homicide is a class E felony that, under New York law, covers causing another person’s death through criminal negligence. State police said Joseph Polizzi was arraigned after his arrest and remanded to the Schoharie County Correctional Facility unless he posted $5,000 cash bail, a $10,000 bond or a $50,000 partially secured bond. Police did not identify a defense lawyer in the arrest announcement, and the release did not list a plea or a date for his next court appearance. The next public stage of the case will come in Schoharie County court, but police statements and local reports reviewed Monday did not say when that appearance would happen.
The starkest element of the police account is its geography. Investigators say the woman was not found in a distant field or an abandoned structure, but in a shed on the same property where her son was living in a residence nearby. In the release announcing the arrest, troopers repeatedly described Joseph Polizzi as both Nancy Polizzi’s son and her caregiver, a pairing that puts family duty at the center of the criminal allegations. Dr. Ng’s finding that she died of sepsis from untreated bedsores gave the case a clinical precision that matched the emotional force of the setting: a dependent older woman in an unheated outbuilding during an upstate winter. Police have not released photographs from the property or described the inside of the shed beyond the lack of water and heat, and no public statements from relatives or neighbors had surfaced in the reporting reviewed Monday. For now, the official record remains spare and grim, built around a shed, a nearby home and a long list of care that investigators say never came.
As of Monday, April 20, Joseph Polizzi remained charged with criminally negligent homicide and first-degree endangering the welfare of a vulnerable elderly person. The next milestone is his return to Schoharie County court, but police statements and local reports reviewed Monday did not identify when that appearance will happen.
Author note: Last updated April 20, 2026.