The family’s father passed away in July 2020. His two adult children hired the funeral home in Dallas for his memorial service and cremation, and asked to be contacted as soon as the cremation was complete and his cremains were ready to pick up. His daughter had already purchased an urn. She was ready to bring her father home.
Weeks went by without a word. When the family began reaching out, the funeral home gave them excuses — including that it had been waiting weeks on a death certificate — and kept delaying. Then it stopped responding altogether.
The family never received their father’s cremains, and their whereabouts are unknown to this day. We allege that the funeral home disposed of them by scattering them into the foliage behind its own building — without the family’s permission, and without ever telling them. His urn sits on his daughter’s mantle, empty.
We filed suit in Dallas County against the funeral home and the funeral director in charge of it. Texas law is specific about cremains: the Health and Safety Code requires a funeral establishment to release them to the person entitled to receive them, and the rules of the trade require positive identification at every step — identification of the body, labeled cremation containers, no simultaneous cremations, no commingling, written receipts, release only to authorized persons, and records of every cremation performed. The suit alleges failures across that entire chain.
It also reaches the man responsible for it: the funeral director in charge, who supervised more than one hundred employees and agents, allegedly allowed unlicensed individuals to perform funeral services, and ran a volume of services the funeral home did not have the capacity, space, or resources to handle.
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 — and we are pursuing exemplary damages. We are making them account, on the record, for what happened to this father’s cremains, why his family was stonewalled, and why the urn they bought for him is still empty.
When a family hands a funeral home their father, they are owed one thing back: their father. Not excuses, not silence — him.
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 — and we are pursuing exemplary damages. We are making them account, on the record, for what happened to this father’s cremains, why his family was stonewalled, and why the urn they bought for him is still empty.
When a family hands a funeral home their father, they are owed one thing back: their father. Not excuses, not silence — him.
