The family’s loved one passed away in January 2018. His mother and brother arranged his cremation with the funeral home in Dallas and asked that the brother be notified as soon as the cremains were ready to be picked up.
More than two months passed with no word. When the brother went in to ask, the funeral home’s cremation employee told him the process could take months — even more than a year. He kept calling, periodically, over the months that followed. Each time, the funeral home told him the cremation had not yet been performed.
In April 2021 — more than three years after his brother’s death — he attended another family member’s service at the funeral home and asked one of its managers to check the records. The records showed his brother had been cremated the week after he died, in January 2018. They claimed no one had appeared to collect his cremains. And under the funeral home’s own policy, the cremains had been disposed of after six months. The brother had to carry that news to his mother: the funeral home had cremated her son years before, told the family over and over that it hadn’t, and disposed of what remained of him.
We filed suit in Dallas County against the funeral home and the funeral director in charge of it. The funeral home’s records and its staff cannot both be right: the records say the cremation was done within a week and the cremains were disposed of at six months under policy, while its employees spent three years telling the brother the cremation hadn’t happened yet. And while the records claim no one came to collect the cremains, the brother had been asking for them the entire time — the manager could not say whether the funeral home kept any record of his attempts at all.
Texas law requires a funeral establishment to release cremains to the person entitled to receive them, and the rules of the trade require identification, written receipts, authorized release, and records of every cremation. A family that asks for their loved one’s cremains for three years should never be told “not yet” while the answer in the file is “already gone.”
We brought claims for negligence, negligence per se under the Texas Health and Safety Code, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and gross negligence against the funeral home, and negligent-supervision claims against its funeral director in charge — who oversaw more than one hundred employees, allegedly allowed unlicensed individuals to perform funeral services, and ran a volume the funeral home could not handle. We are pursuing exemplary damages, and we are making them account, on the record, for the years of false answers and for what was done with this man’s cremains.
A mother who hands a funeral home her son is owed the truth — and she is owed her son back.
We brought claims for negligence, negligence per se under the Texas Health and Safety Code, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and gross negligence against the funeral home, and negligent-supervision claims against its funeral director in charge — who oversaw more than one hundred employees, allegedly allowed unlicensed individuals to perform funeral services, and ran a volume the funeral home could not handle. We are pursuing exemplary damages, and we are making them account, on the record, for the years of false answers and for what was done with this man’s cremains.
A mother who hands a funeral home her son is owed the truth — and she is owed her son back.
