After their mother passed away, four siblings turned to the funeral home in Orlando to handle her funeral. They arranged for the full slate of services, funeral director and staff, embalming, visitation, the ceremony, the casket, the burial, and transportation of their mother.
Before the scheduled funeral, the family went to view her. The moment they saw the body, they knew it was not their mother. This was not a hesitation or a second-guess; they recognized immediately that the person in front of them was someone else entirely.
They told the funeral home so. But instead of stopping everything to account for how the wrong body had ended up there, the funeral home pushed back, continuing, through both its statements and its conduct, to try to convince the family that the body was their mother. The people who were supposed to care for their mother could not even produce her, and would not admit it.
We are pursuing claims against the funeral home on behalf of the family. The single most basic duty a funeral home owes is to keep track of whose body is whose and to present the right person to the family who entrusted them. Here, as pleaded, the funeral home presented the wrong body for the family’s mother’s funeral, and when the family identified the error on the spot, it interfered with their mother’s funeral and burial by insisting the body was hers anyway.
Telling a grieving family that a stranger is their mother, and pressing the point through words and actions after they have said otherwise, is not a clerical slip. It is the kind of conduct that compounds the loss, and under Florida law it implicates both the wrongful interference with a deceased body and the deceptive, unconscionable practices the state’s consumer-protection law and the federal Funeral Rule are meant to prevent.
We brought claims under Florida law for negligence and tortious interference with a deceased body, and for violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the FTC Funeral Rule. We are demanding that the funeral home account for presenting the wrong body, for interfering with the family’s mother’s funeral and burial, and for insisting the family was wrong about their own mother.
A family that hands a funeral home their mother has the right to have their mother, correctly identified, returned to them for the goodbye they planned. A funeral home that shows them someone else and then argues the point has to answer for it.
We brought claims under Florida law for negligence and tortious interference with a deceased body, and for violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and the FTC Funeral Rule. We are demanding that the funeral home account for presenting the wrong body, for interfering with the family’s mother’s funeral and burial, and for insisting the family was wrong about their own mother.
A family that hands a funeral home their mother has the right to have their mother, correctly identified, returned to them for the goodbye they planned. A funeral home that shows them someone else and then argues the point has to answer for it.
