After their mother passed away in February 2022, the family turned to the funeral home in Houston to care for her body and to handle her visitation and funeral. They met with the funeral director to make arrangements and paid for open-casket services. One of her daughters brought the funeral home her mother’s dress and a photograph so the staff could prepare her hair and makeup the way she looked in life.
On the evening of the visitation, several family members arrived early for private time with their mother before other guests came. When the funeral director walked them into the parlor, they were met with a scene no family should ever see: their mother was unrecognizable. Her face was swollen and distorted, fluid was leaking from her ears, and the pillow beneath her head and both shoulders of her dress were wet, with more fluid down the lower part of the dress. The funeral director saw the same thing they did.
More family arrived minutes later. One of her daughters could not bring herself to view her mother’s body at all. So that the friends and relatives still arriving would not have to remember her this way, the family made the painful decision to close the casket, the open-casket service they had paid for and planned. Their mother’s funeral was held the next day with the casket closed.
We filed suit in Harris County. At the center of this case is a funeral home that was paid to embalm and prepare a family’s mother and did not do it in the manner the family was promised. The condition the family found her in, visible fluid leaking from the body, a soaked dress and pillow at the viewing, is not what proper preparation looks like, and it is exactly what embalming and proper care are supposed to prevent.
The failures compounded from there. No one at the funeral home recognized and corrected the condition of the body before the family arrived, and no one warned the family of what they were about to walk into. A family that trusted this funeral home with their mother was left to discover the problem themselves, in the parlor, in the moments they had set aside to grieve.
We 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 characteristics, 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 failing to properly embalm and care for the body entrusted to them. We are making the funeral home account for failing to properly embalm their mother, for failing to supervise her care, for failing to recognize and correct the condition of her body, and for failing to warn the family before they saw her.
A family that pays a funeral home to embalm their mother and prepare her for an open-casket goodbye is entitled to exactly that. Leaving them to find her unrecognizable at her own visitation, and then refusing to make it right, is the opposite of the care this funeral home promised, and it has to answer for it.
Learn more about our Texas funeral home negligence practice.
