The mother gave birth to her infant son in Dallas in May 2025. The baby did not survive. She arranged services with the funeral home in Dallas, an infant funeral, a viewing, and a cremation, with the cremains to be returned to the family.
That is not what happened. A week after the viewing, workers at a commercial laundry facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, more than 180 miles from Dallas, opened a shipment of soiled linens from the funeral home and smelled formaldehyde. They searched the linens and found the body of the infant inside.
While the body was missing, the mother had been calling the funeral home to ask when her son’s cremains would be ready. The funeral home never told her the body was gone. She learned what had happened from a news report.
We filed suit in Dallas County. We obtained the funeral home’s intake records, custody records, and internal staff notes. We took the sworn testimony of the funeral home’s CEO and designated funeral director in charge.
Under oath, the CEO could not explain how an infant’s body left his facility’s refrigeration unit and ended up in a commercial laundry bin headed for Louisiana. He testified that no employee came forward. He testified that the morgue’s security cameras only retain about five days of footage, gone by the time anyone went looking. And he testified that he had not pressed his staff to find out what happened.
The Texas Funeral Service Commission opened a parallel investigation and alleged the funeral home had engaged in dishonest conduct, willful conduct, and negligence in the practice of funeral directing. Public Dallas County court records show the funeral home’s parent company has been sued more than thirty times in the last five years.
We brought claims for negligence, gross negligence, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. We made the funeral home produce its records, sit for sworn deposition, and account, on the record, for an infant’s body that left its facility without permission, without authorization, and without explanation.
A funeral home does not get to misplace a baby’s body, fail to tell the family, and leave the mother to find out from the news.
We brought claims for negligence, gross negligence, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. We made the funeral home produce its records, sit for sworn deposition, and account, on the record, for an infant’s body that left its facility without permission, without authorization, and without explanation.
A funeral home does not get to misplace a baby’s body, fail to tell the family, and leave the mother to find out from the news.
The matter resolved between the mother and the funeral home. The terms of the resolution are confidential.
