The family’s mother passed away in October 2016. The family had owned a row of plots at the cemetery in Vidor since 2003, family plots, side by side, where a granddaughter was already buried. The mother was laid to rest in her proper plot, and for nearly six years her family visited her there.
In April 2022, a granddaughter went to the cemetery to visit and found the grave freshly disturbed, the earth dug up, the body gone. The cemetery had removed the body and reburied it in a different plot. No one had asked the family. No one had told the family. They discovered it the way no family ever should: by standing over a disturbed grave.
When the family confronted the cemetery, it insisted the body had never been moved at all, that their mother had been buried somewhere else the whole time. The family knew better. They demanded the plots be probed. The probe confirmed it: the plot where she was buried in 2016 was empty, and her body was in a different grave.
We filed suit in Orange County. The cemetery had disinterred the body and moved it to another plot months before the family ever found out, and the family received no call, no letter, and no authorization request, nothing. When the family came asking questions, the cemetery’s story shifted: first that the body had never moved, then that it had been buried in the wrong plot all along, then that someone had tried to call a phone number the family had held for fifty years and never received a call on.
A cemetery cannot dig up a body and rebury it somewhere else without the family’s consent. Texas law and basic decency both require more. The family bought those plots, buried their mother in the right one, and had every right to know, and to decide, before anyone put a shovel in that ground.
We brought claims for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. We are making the cemetery account, on the record, for moving a body without permission, for failing to notify the family, and for telling a grieving family their mother was never moved when its own records, and the empty grave, said otherwise.
A family should never have to probe their own loved one’s grave to find out where the cemetery put her.
We brought claims for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. We are making the cemetery account, on the record, for moving a body without permission, for failing to notify the family, and for telling a grieving family their mother was never moved when its own records, and the empty grave, said otherwise.
A family should never have to probe their own loved one’s grave to find out where the cemetery put her.
