Funeral Home Company Accused of Abusing Corpses
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A Virginia funeral home is being sued by the family of a deceased Army veteran for mishandling the man’s body. The family claims that the body was left in an unrefrigerated garage for over two months while awaiting burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The family is seeking $60 million in damages from the National Funeral Home and its parent company, Houston based Service Corp. International, according to the New York Times.
This is not the first allegation of corpse mishandling made against SCI. In December 2003 SCI settled a class action lawsuit in Florida for $100 million. That suit involved approximately 700 families who claimed that the company’s cemeteries had misplace bodies, lost track of plots, and dug up remains so new graves could be marked.
Another lawsuit has been filed against SCI in Virginia regarding the family members who were traumatized by the reopening of their loved one’s grave. There are other Whistleblower lawsuits that have been filed claiming the corpses had been stored in garages and kept in unsanitary conditions.
In Texas there is a “special relationship” between a funeral home and its patrons, which gives rise to a recognized duty of the funeral home to perform its service adequately. This duty can be violated in a variety of ways, which may result in a family having a claim for damages due to treatment of the deceased. For example the law provides that the remains in a plot can only be removed with the written consent of the current plot owner. Other cases in Texas have centered on mishandling the corpse. Some of the cases are about the funeral home director not following the contract while others have stated the wrong corpse was used during the burial.
Death is such a difficult time for the families involved and when funeral homes disregard your wishes it makes it that much more difficult to bring families to closure.