The son’s father passed away in April 2024. Living out of state, the son arranged cremation through the funeral home, which performs its cremations through an affiliated crematory on the same grounds in Texas City. Then the paperwork came back with a problem: the weight listed for his father was off by at least one hundred pounds from his father’s medical records.
Worried the funeral home had the wrong man, the son asked for a photo so he could confirm his father’s identity before the cremation. The funeral home refused — telling him, wrongly, that the law would not allow a photograph to confirm identity. It created the confusion, then blocked the one simple step that would have resolved it.
The funeral home confirmed the cremains would be returned to the son and told him no cremation authorization needed to be signed. He asked in two emails, and again by phone, that his father’s cremains be mailed to him. Instead, the funeral home gave the cremains to someone else — without his consent, without notice, without a word. When he pressed for answers, the funeral home’s response was to threaten “abandonment” claims against him.
We filed suit in Galveston County against both companies. The funeral home released a man’s cremains to someone other than his son without obtaining any written delegation, consent, or permission, and without ever notifying the son it had done so — after expressly confirming the cremains would come back to him. And when its own paperwork put his father’s identity in doubt, it refused the simplest confirmation available and invented a legal excuse for the refusal.
A funeral home holding a person’s cremains holds the last of someone’s father. It does not get to hand that to whomever it pleases, hide it from the family, and answer a grieving son’s questions with threats.
We brought claims against both companies for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including unconscionable conduct in refusing an identity photo under an invented legal excuse and deliberately releasing the cremains to someone other than the son. We are making them account, on the record, for where this father’s cremains went, who authorized it, and why his son was never told.
A son who asks for his father’s cremains should receive his father’s cremains. Not silence, and not a threat.
We brought claims against both companies for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, and violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including unconscionable conduct in refusing an identity photo under an invented legal excuse and deliberately releasing the cremains to someone other than the son. We are making them account, on the record, for where this father’s cremains went, who authorized it, and why his son was never told.
A son who asks for his father’s cremains should receive his father’s cremains. Not silence, and not a threat.
