After her father passed away in August 2025, the daughter arranged his cremation through the funeral home. She was his only biological child, he had no surviving spouse, and she completed all of the paperwork herself. Under the law and on the funeral home’s own records, she alone had the right to receive her father’s cremains.
The funeral home gave them to someone else. An employee released her father’s ashes to his girlfriend, a person with no legal authority to receive them, reportedly because of that employee’s personal relationship with her. The funeral home never obtained the daughter’s written consent, and never notified her that her father had been handed to anyone else.
From there it got worse. The girlfriend gave the cremains to yet another unauthorized person. The daughter has repeatedly asked the funeral home to return her father’s ashes to her, the person who always had the sole right to them, and that request has been refused. As things stand, she still does not have her father back.
Before filing suit, we sent the funeral home a formal notice of claim under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, giving it the sixty-day opportunity the law provides to make the matter right. The cremains still were not returned. We filed suit in Dallas County.
Releasing a person’s cremains is not a casual hand-off, it requires confirming who has the legal right to receive them and getting proper authorization before anything leaves the building. Here, the funeral home had the paperwork in front of it showing the daughter’s sole right, and released her father to an unauthorized person anyway, without her consent and without telling her. The record points to a failure to follow basic standards of care and to train and supervise staff on who may receive a loved one’s remains.
We brought claims for negligence and negligent misrepresentation, and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representing that the cremation services had benefits and a quality they did not have, breaching the implied warranty that the services would be performed in a good and workmanlike manner, and engaging in an unconscionable course of action by promising to return the cremains to the authorized person and then failing to do so. We pleaded that the funeral home acted knowingly and that its conduct was unconscionable in deliberately releasing the cremains to someone other than the daughter.
A funeral home does not get to hand a man’s ashes to whoever happens to be standing there, least of all over the one person the law and its own paperwork say is entitled to them, and then refuse to give him back.
Learn more about our Texas funeral home negligence practice.
