Funeral homes in Florida and around the country continue to make burial mistakes. Schrader Funeral Home in St. Louis mistakenly buried 80-year-old Frederick Schnabel and instead of admitting their mistake tried to cover it up.
It took awhile to convince the funeral home of the mistake.
Before the wake, an employee came in with a makeup kit to see if doing some touchups would help.
“They tried to convince us that they can just fix it,” said one of Schnabel’s two daughters, Jeani Ward of Ballwin. “I said, ‘No, the body is not Dad.’ We had to try to convince Schrader’s it wasn’t Dad. That was the hardest part.”
Finally, the man’s shirt was unbuttoned to check for the scars from Schnabel’s open-heart surgery. The man in the casket had none.
On Friday, the funeral home declined to talk to the Post-Dispatch, referring questions to the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm. The firm said Schrader “deeply regrets the extraordinary mistake” and said it was the first of its kind in the funeral home’s 140-year history.
Schrader Funeral Home also refunded the cost of both funerals and “at its own expense, provided completely new, second funerals including caskets, ministers, police escorts, floral arrangements, transportation and burial services,” the firm said.
And finally, Schrader has implemented a new rule: Bodies must have identification tags before coming to the funeral home.
Even with identification tags bodies can be mistakenly buried or even cremated. If a Florida funeral home or cemetery mistakenly cremates or buries one of your relatives contact a funeral home negligence attorney as soon as possible.