In May 2019, a Livingston woman bought a cemetery plot in full from the cemetery. She chose it carefully, the space directly beside her late husband, so that when her time came, she would be laid to rest next to him. She paid for it, trusted the cemetery to hold it, and relied on that promise.
In January 2021, her family went to visit her husband’s grave. There they discovered something no one expected: her plot, the one she had purchased and reserved for herself, was already occupied. An unrelated person, someone the family had no connection to, had been buried in the space she owned.
The cemetery had buried someone else’s loved one in the wrong plot, and never realized its mistake. The error created two harms at once: a grieving family had their loved one placed in the wrong grave, and the woman who owned the plot was left to confront the loss of the resting place she had chosen beside her husband, knowing that setting it right could mean disturbing a burial that should never have happened there.
We are pursuing claims against the cemetery on behalf of the plot owner. A cemetery’s most basic responsibilities are to keep accurate records of who owns which plot and who is buried where, to honor the plots it has sold, and to bury each person in the correct, authorized space. As pleaded, the cemetery failed at all of it, it allowed an unrelated person to be buried in a plot that had already been sold and paid for, and it failed to catch the error.
When a person buys a specific burial plot, the cemetery is obligated to keep that space for them and no one else. Reselling or wrongly using a plot that is already owned, and burying a stranger in it, is a fundamental breach of that obligation, and it leaves real people on both sides: a family whose loved one was buried in the wrong place, and an owner whose chosen final resting spot beside her husband was taken.
We brought claims for negligence and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including the cemetery’s failure to honor the plot it sold, its failure to keep proper records and supervise its interments, its failure to bury the other decedent in the correct authorized plot, and its failure to notify the plot owner of the error. We are demanding that the cemetery account, on the record, for selling a plot it then gave away.
When a cemetery takes a person’s money for a specific resting place, it has to keep that place for them. A cemetery that instead buries a stranger in it, and never catches the mistake, has to answer for it.
We brought claims for negligence and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including the cemetery’s failure to honor the plot it sold, its failure to keep proper records and supervise its interments, its failure to bury the other decedent in the correct authorized plot, and its failure to notify the plot owner of the error. We are demanding that the cemetery account, on the record, for selling a plot it then gave away.
When a cemetery takes a person’s money for a specific resting place, it has to keep that place for them. A cemetery that instead buries a stranger in it, and never catches the mistake, has to answer for it.
