After her mother passed away in the spring of 2024, the daughter went to the funeral home in San Antonio and arranged for embalming and funeral services. Embalming was part of what she paid for and what the funeral home agreed to provide, a basic step in preparing her mother for her final resting place in a mausoleum crypt.
The funeral home never embalmed her. Roughly two weeks after her mother’s death, the funeral home transported her to be placed in the crypt, her permanent, above-ground resting place, without ever embalming her, and without encasing her in a container first.
Placing an unembalmed body in a sealed crypt is not a minor oversight. Embalming and proper encasement exist precisely because of what happens to a body that is sealed away without them. The daughter had trusted the funeral home with the most basic duty of care for her mother, and that duty was not carried out.
We filed suit in Bexar County. The funeral home represented that it would prepare the daughter’s mother for final disposition and coordinate her services in a good and workmanlike manner. The record reflects that it did not do the central thing it was retained and paid to do.
This was not a complicated request. The mother was supposed to be embalmed, properly prepared, and placed in the crypt with the care a mausoleum interment requires. Instead she was sent to her final resting place unembalmed and uncontained, a failure that points to a breakdown in basic procedure, training, and supervision of the people responsible for her care.
We brought claims for negligence and negligent misrepresentation, and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representing that the services had benefits and a quality 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 promising to embalm and properly prepare the daughter’s mother and then failing to do so.
A family that pays a funeral home to embalm and prepare their mother is entitled to exactly that. Sealing her into a crypt unembalmed, in no container, is the opposite of the care the funeral home promised, and it has to answer for it.
We brought claims for negligence and negligent misrepresentation, and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representing that the services had benefits and a quality 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 promising to embalm and properly prepare the daughter’s mother and then failing to do so.
A family that pays a funeral home to embalm and prepare their mother is entitled to exactly that. Sealing her into a crypt unembalmed, in no container, is the opposite of the care the funeral home promised, and it has to answer for it.
