The family’s mother passed away in November 2023. Her daughters laid her to rest at the cemetery, a privately owned perpetual-care cemetery in Houston. Both daughters were present at the burial, and for the next year and a half they visited their mother’s grave regularly and faithfully.
In February 2025, one of the daughters returned to the cemetery to place a plaque on her mother’s grave. The grave had been disturbed, and her mother’s body was no longer there.
The cemetery admitted what it had done: it had dug up their mother and moved her to another location without seeking the family’s authorization, without providing notice, and without so much as a phone call or a letter to the daughters it knew survived her. The women who stood at their mother’s burial learned she had been moved only because one of them happened to come back.
We filed suit in Harris County. A perpetual-care cemetery’s most basic obligations are to safeguard the sanctity of the graves in its care, keep accurate burial records, and never put a shovel in the ground over someone’s loved one without the family’s consent. This cemetery disturbed and relocated a mother’s body with no authorization, no notice to her next of kin, and no policies or procedures that stopped it from happening, and then left the family to discover the empty grave on their own.
A cemetery cannot dig up a body and rebury it somewhere else without the family’s consent. Texas law and basic decency both require more.
We brought claims for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, gross negligence, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and we are pursuing exemplary damages for the cemetery’s conscious indifference to this family. We are making the cemetery account, on the record, for moving a mother’s body without authorization, for failing to notify her daughters, and for the records, policies, training, and supervision that should have made this impossible.
Daughters should never have to learn from a disturbed, empty grave that the cemetery moved their mother.
We brought claims for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, gross negligence, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and we are pursuing exemplary damages for the cemetery’s conscious indifference to this family. We are making the cemetery account, on the record, for moving a mother’s body without authorization, for failing to notify her daughters, and for the records, policies, training, and supervision that should have made this impossible.
Daughters should never have to learn from a disturbed, empty grave that the cemetery moved their mother.
