Jacksonville Injury Lawyer Blog

A cremation lawsuit was just filed last month in Alabama.
For two years, an Alabama man thought he had his wife’s cremated ashes. The former Huntsville resident is suing Laughlin Service Funeral Home alleging he was given the remains of a stranger after his deceased wife was cremated in 2006. The funeral home lawsuit was filed electronically in Madison County Circuit Court on Saturday on behalf of Richard Henry Parrott. Parrott seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

“As a result of the defendants (Laughlin Service Funeral Home) negligent and/or wanton actions in handling and delivering the remains of Julia Parrott, the plaintiff (Richard Parrott) has suffered emotional distress and mental anguish and the actions have had a direct effect on the physical health of the plaintiff,” the suit says.

John Purdy, owner of the funeral home, said Thursday he did not know about the lawsuit. Parrott and his lawyer have not notified him about the alleged problem, he said.

For two years the urn remained on a shelf in Parrott’s home, the suit says. Parrott did not discover the cremation mix-up until he was packing to move to Orlando, Fla.

“On or about Oct. 29, 2008, while in the process of moving, the plaintiff (Parrott) discovered, for the first time, a label on the bottom of the urn that stated the urn contained the cremated remains of a stranger,” the lawsuit said.

Parrott hired Laughlin to take care of his wife’s remains on the Sunday she died, the lawsuit says.

The cremation was carried out beginning at 4 p.m. on Dec. 8 through about 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 9, the lawsuit says. At the funeral home Dec. 9, Parrott signed a release form and picked up an urn that he thought contained his wife’s remains. He returned home and placed the urn on a shelf where it remained for two years.

The funeral home breached its duties to Parrott by either mislabeling the urn or delivering the wrong urn, the lawsuit says.

Thank you to taphophilia.com for the following update:
A former funeral director in suburban Rochester was convicted Friday of removing body parts without permission from 17 corpses.
Jason Gano, 32, was the first of seven people to stand trial here on charges of illegally dissecting skin, bone and other parts from three dozen bodies being prepared for cremation at three Rochester-area funeral homes in 2005. During a monthlong trial, the defense argued that an unscrupulous biomedical company in New Jersey run by Michael Mastromarino sent Gano forged documents indicating relatives had given their consent. But prosecutors countered that Gano systematically allowed Mastromarino’s employees to loot bodies without permission.

After two days of deliberations, a jury found Gano guilty of illegal-harvesting charges relating to 17 of 23 corpses from which body parts were turned over to Fort Lee, N.J.-based Biomedical Tissue Services. He could draw up to 10 years to 20 years in prison at sentencing on Jan. 16.
Biomedical Tissue Services operated its only satellite office in the Rochester suburb of Brighton and paid funeral homes a standard fee of about $1,000 to lawfully harvest body parts from a donor corpse.

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.

A class action lawsuit has been filed in which potentially thousands of customers who purchased “pre-need” contracts for burial services at Rubin Memorial in West Palm Beach Florida have been defrauded by the Florida funeral home in its attempt to overcharge them for out-of-state costs related to burial services, an action that is prohibited by Florida law. The class action alleges that Rubin Memorial created entirely false invoices, often doubling the prices of estimated services, and passed them off to consumers, while pocketing the difference. The scheme involved Rubin Memorial scanning the invoices received from out-of-state funeral homes and altering the invoices on a computer.
If you or a family member have been the victim of funeral home abuse or funeral home fraud make sure to call an experienced funeral home lawyer.