After her husband passed away in June 2023, a widow turned to the funeral home to handle his final disposition, including his cremation. She trusted the funeral home to do what it was hired to do, to care for her husband, cremate him, and return his cremains to her.
Instead, she was met with silence. For months, she tried to reach the funeral home to retrieve her husband’s cremains and could not get a straight answer. A grieving wife was left waiting, calling, and wondering, with no explanation for why she could not get her husband back.
When the funeral home finally responded, the explanation was worse than she could have imagined: her husband had never been cremated. He had been kept in a freezer the entire time. To this day, she still has not received his cremains and does not even know whether he has been cremated at all, leaving her with severe distress and a grief that has never been allowed to close.
A family that pays a funeral home to cremate a loved one is paying for that loved one to be cared for, cremated, and returned to them, and to be kept informed and treated honestly along the way. The funeral home did none of that. It did not cremate her husband, it did not safely and properly handle his body, and it did not tell her what had happened until she had spent months trying to find out.
The petition alleges the funeral home failed to properly safekeep the husband’s body, failed to exercise due care to avoid mishandling it, failed to cremate him, failed to keep proper records, and failed to timely notify the widow of its error, along with a failure to properly train and supervise its staff on the recordkeeping and handling that would have prevented this. The result was not a paperwork delay; it was a husband left unburied and uncremated, and a wife left without him.
We filed suit in Harris County and brought claims for negligence and negligent misrepresentation and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representing that the funeral home’s services had qualities and benefits 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 representing it would properly prepare and handle her husband’s final disposition when it did not. We made the funeral home account for failing to cremate her husband, for improperly storing his body, for failing to keep records, and for leaving her in the dark for months.
A widow who pays a funeral home to cremate her husband and bring him home is entitled to exactly that. Leaving him in a freezer, never cremating him, and forcing her to chase the truth for months is the opposite of the care this funeral home promised, and it had to answer for it.
We filed suit in Harris County and brought claims for negligence and negligent misrepresentation and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representing that the funeral home’s services had qualities and benefits 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 representing it would properly prepare and handle her husband’s final disposition when it did not. We made the funeral home account for failing to cremate her husband, for improperly storing his body, for failing to keep records, and for leaving her in the dark for months.
A widow who pays a funeral home to cremate her husband and bring him home is entitled to exactly that. Leaving him in a freezer, never cremating him, and forcing her to chase the truth for months is the opposite of the care this funeral home promised, and it had to answer for it.
