Their mother and wife passed away in March 2021. The family went to the mortuary in Texarkana to arrange a visitation and a traditional, open-casket funeral.
What the funeral home did not tell them: it had no way to refrigerate her body, and it could not accommodate her at its own facility. Two days after taking her into its care, without telling the family or getting their approval, the funeral home put her in a body bag and drove her across state lines to a facility in Little Rock, Arkansas for embalming. It did so without the burial transit permit that Texas law requires for transporting a body.
She was not embalmed until roughly thirty-nine hours after her death. The combination of that delay and the lack of refrigeration took a visible toll: when she was returned, her body had deformed badly from swelling, seeping, and skin slippage.
Faced with that disfigurement, the funeral director in charge tried to persuade the family to cancel the open-casket service and cremate her instead. The family refused, but were forced into a closed casket. And although the funeral home had days to ask about burial clothing, no one ever did, so their mother was buried wearing only a hospital gown. While moving her casket in and out of the chapel, the funeral home damaged it.
The family reported the funeral home to the Texas Funeral Service Commission. After investigating, the Commission issued a seven-page report concluding that the mortuary and its agents had committed ten separate violations, including unethical conduct regarding the custody of a body for violating state law on the transportation, storage, and refrigeration of a body, and dishonest, willful, or negligent conduct in the practice of embalming and funeral directing.
We filed suit in Bowie County. The record showed a funeral home that did not have the refrigeration or the facilities to care for the body it had taken in, transported it out of state without the required permit, let it deteriorate for hours, employed an unlicensed funeral director, and charged the family for services, like cleaning the body, that it should never have billed.
We brought claims for negligence, negligence per se, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the Texas Occupations Code governing funeral directing. We made the mortuary account for transporting a body across state lines without a permit, for having no refrigeration, for the delay and the disfigurement, for trying to steer the family away from the service they wanted, and for burying their mother in a hospital gown.
A family that plans an open-casket funeral is owed a funeral home that can actually care for their loved one’s body. Hauling her to another state in a body bag, letting her deteriorate, and then pushing for cremation to hide the result is the opposite of that.
We brought claims for negligence, negligence per se, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the Texas Occupations Code governing funeral directing. We made the mortuary account for transporting a body across state lines without a permit, for having no refrigeration, for the delay and the disfigurement, for trying to steer the family away from the service they wanted, and for burying their mother in a hospital gown.
A family that plans an open-casket funeral is owed a funeral home that can actually care for their loved one’s body. Hauling her to another state in a body bag, letting her deteriorate, and then pushing for cremation to hide the result is the opposite of that.
