The family’s son passed away in May 2023. His mother went to the funeral home to arrange his funeral and burial: embalming, a church service, and a graveside burial at a cemetery near West Point in Fayette County, in a plot the family already owned. The funeral home assured her a local grave digger would have the grave ready, and on the evening before the funeral, it confirmed that everything was set.
It was not. On the day of the burial, after the church service, family and friends drove to the cemetery for the graveside service, and found the grave had never been opened. There was no tent, no chairs, nothing staged for a burial. Mourners waited in the hot sun for two hours. The service never took place, and the family’s son could not be buried that day.
The body was taken to another funeral home in Smithville for storage, and the funeral home told the family the burial would now take place three days later, at 11:00 a.m. Then the other funeral home alerted the family to something the funeral home never had: their son was being buried at 10:00 that morning, an hour earlier than the family had been told, with no service at all.
The family rushed to the cemetery. Once again, there was no tent and no chairs, and this time, no lowering device for the casket. The grave digger and the mother’s husband lowered her son’s casket into the grave themselves, using straps. The graveside service the family contracted and paid for never happened.
We filed suit in Fayette County, where the cemetery sits. The funeral home’s failures started on paper: it filled out a Statement of Funeral Goods and Services Selected without giving the mother a copy, and when a copy finally arrived, it had been altered to add services she never agreed to, including a limousine and a grave plot the funeral home knew the family already owned. Then it confirmed the burial was ready when nothing was ready, rescheduled, and moved the burial up an hour without telling the family, leaving them to find out from a different funeral home entirely.
When the family sent the funeral home formal notice of their claims, the pattern held: the certified letters went unaccepted, the funeral home’s own fax line would not go through, and no one ever responded. A funeral home that takes a grieving mother’s money to bury her son owes her a dug grave, a graveside service, and a straight answer. This family got none of the three.
We brought claims for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, gross negligence, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including the failure to perform funeral services in a good and workmanlike manner. We are making the funeral home account, on the record, for an unopened grave, an unstaged service, an altered contract, a burial moved up without notice, and a casket a grieving family had to lower into the ground themselves.
When a family hires a funeral home to bury their son, digging the grave and conducting the service is not a courtesy. It is the entire job.
We brought claims for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, gross negligence, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including the failure to perform funeral services in a good and workmanlike manner. We are making the funeral home account, on the record, for an unopened grave, an unstaged service, an altered contract, a burial moved up without notice, and a casket a grieving family had to lower into the ground themselves.
When a family hires a funeral home to bury their son, digging the grave and conducting the service is not a courtesy. It is the entire job.
