After her mother passed away, a daughter turned to the funeral home in New Braunfels to handle the funeral and cremation. The funeral home coordinated the cremation with the crematory in San Antonio. When it was done, the funeral home handed the daughter a box and told her it contained her mother’s cremains.
She did what countless grieving families do, she placed the box somewhere safe and kept it. More than a year later, while moving to a new home, she looked at the box closely for the first time. The label did not bear her mother’s name. It bore someone else’s, a different person entirely, with a cremation number that was not her mother’s. Inside the box was a plastic bag with a metal identification tag, and that tag carried yet another cremation number, different from the one on the outside of the box.
Nothing matched. The remains she had grieved over and kept safe for more than a year were not her mother’s, and the conflicting labels meant no one could simply tell her whose they were.
We are pursuing claims against both the funeral home and the crematory on behalf of the daughter. The family hired the funeral home, the funeral home coordinated the cremation with the crematory, and somewhere in that process the most fundamental duty a funeral business has, keeping track of whose body is whose, failed. The mismatched label on the box and the conflicting identification tag inside it point to remains that were never properly tracked, stored, or identified.
Identifying remains and returning the right ashes to the right family is the entire point. A box handed to a family with another person’s name on it, holding a tag with a third number that matches neither, is proof that the system meant to prevent exactly this was not followed. And the family is left with the cruelest consequence of all: they may never know where their mother is.
We brought claims for negligence and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representations that the services had qualities and benefits they did not, the failure to perform those services in a good and workmanlike manner, and the failures to properly safekeep, store, identify, and care for the cremains. We are demanding that both the funeral home and the crematory account for how a family was given the wrong remains and for what happened to their mother.
A family that entrusts a funeral home and crematory with their mother has the right to get their mother back, correctly identified, every time. When two businesses in that chain hand a daughter a stranger’s ashes and cannot say where her mother is, they have to answer for it.
We brought claims for negligence and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representations that the services had qualities and benefits they did not, the failure to perform those services in a good and workmanlike manner, and the failures to properly safekeep, store, identify, and care for the cremains. We are demanding that both the funeral home and the crematory account for how a family was given the wrong remains and for what happened to their mother.
A family that entrusts a funeral home and crematory with their mother has the right to get their mother back, correctly identified, every time. When two businesses in that chain hand a daughter a stranger’s ashes and cannot say where her mother is, they have to answer for it.
