Ghoulish Funeral Home Discovery Leads To Criminal Sentencing Of Funeral Director
According to a recent newspaper article published in Canada a funeral director delivered to a grieving daughter remains other than those that were supposed to be those of her mother. Instead, the grieving daughter, Ellen Johnson, received someone else’s remains and has no idea what happened to her mother’s body after she died. The funeral director was charged with 34 counts of fraud and 2 counts of negligence with respect to the proper care of human remains and indignities to human remains. According to news sources, the funeral director’s lawyer indicated that he will plead guilty to 38 charges.
Ellen Johnson, the daughter of her deceased mother, Jessie, was quoted as saying “This is a nightmare. First you find out the ashes aren’t yours and then you wonder what he did do and how he did he do it and how did he keep all these bodies all this time. Were they kept in a proper facility?” It turned out that the funeral director has been operating a funeral home without a license from between 2003 and 2005. The investigation revealed that a number of the funeral director’s clients were given ashes other than the remains of their loved ones.
At the funeral home abuse law firm of Reiff & Bily, we understand that a funeral home owes its clients the highest duty of care when it comes time to prepare a deceased loved one for burial or cremation. The experienced funeral home abuse lawyers of Reiff & Bily have represented clients whose deceased loved ones have been treated in an unprofessional, abhorrent and irresponsible manner with great success. Unfortunately, as the above story indicates, funeral home abuse includes cases involving improper cremation methods and mixing identification of cremated remains. In some cases, funeral homes have even lost the body of loved ones, and commonly misrepresent the services of the cemetery or cremation facility. We believe that funeral home exploitation is one of the most extreme and abhorrent violations of trust that exists between the family of the deceased and the funeral home staff and such abuse and exploitation affects innocent families at their worst moments. In a tightening economy, reports have indicated a rise in the following unscrupulous acts by funeral, cemetery and cremation providers: wrong bodies being cremated, bodies not being stored correctly, bodies not being correctly buried or not buried at all, improper embalming, multiple bodies placed in one coffin, body parts removed and sold and grave sites vandalized and covered with waste.
If you or a family member have been the victim of cemetery negligence, funeral home negligence or cremation negligence, please contact the experienced funeral home abuse lawyers for a free confidential and no obligation consultation at 1-800-421-9595 or online at www.reiffandbily.com.
