After their father passed away, three adult children made arrangements with the funeral home in Dallas to handle his funeral and cremation. They held his wake and funeral and asked one simple thing: that the funeral home call them when the cremation was complete so they could pick up his remains. The funeral home told the family the cremains would be ready in a couple of weeks, at most.
Weeks passed with no word. When the family asked what was happening, the funeral home deflected, repeating the same excuse over and over, that it was waiting on a death certificate. It was not until November, many months later, that the funeral home finally told a daughter her father’s remains were ready, and she picked them up.
The excuse did not hold together. The only death certificate the funeral home ever produced was issued the following April, long after the funeral home had spent months claiming it was waiting on that very document. The certificate it said it was waiting for did not yet exist when it was using it as the reason for the delay.
We are pursuing claims against the funeral home and the funeral director in charge. As pleaded, the funeral home failed to execute and keep the documents Texas law requires to authorize a cremation and to identify the remains, the cremation-authorization form and the written identification statement called for under the Texas Health and Safety Code. Without that paperwork, there is no reliable record that the ashes returned to this family were actually their father’s.
A funeral home that cremates a body has one set of duties above all others: get authorization, identify the remains, keep the records, and return the right ashes to the right family. The months of delay, the false excuse about a death certificate, and the missing identification documents point to a funeral home that did not follow the basic procedures meant to make sure a family gets their own loved one back.
We brought claims for negligence, negligence per se, and gross negligence, including the failure to obtain a cremation authorization form and to provide the written identification statement Texas law requires, and the failure to supervise the people performing the cremation. We are demanding that the funeral home and its director account for the months of delay, the false excuse, and the missing paperwork that leaves this family without certainty about their own father’s remains.
A family that hands a funeral home their father has a right to get their father back, and to know it. A funeral home that cannot prove the ashes it returned were his has to answer for that.
We brought claims for negligence, negligence per se, and gross negligence, including the failure to obtain a cremation authorization form and to provide the written identification statement Texas law requires, and the failure to supervise the people performing the cremation. We are demanding that the funeral home and its director account for the months of delay, the false excuse, and the missing paperwork that leaves this family without certainty about their own father’s remains.
A family that hands a funeral home their father has a right to get their father back, and to know it. A funeral home that cannot prove the ashes it returned were his has to answer for that.
