Funeral Home Negligence HoustonHouston Funeral Attorney
If you have suffered the loss of a loved one, you know what a painful time it can be for you and your family. Funeral homes, mortuaries, crematoriums, funeral directors and death care specialists are expected to help you deal with the difficult process of burial or cremation arrangements in a dignified manner. Grieving relatives and friends trust death care professionals to guide you through the process. When a funeral home, mortuary, funeral director or death care specialist breaches the trust that you’ve placed in them, you may have a claim for damages. Our funeral home lawyers at Ben Bronston & Associates, fight to protect the rights of loved ones and friends whose trust has been breached by funeral homes.

Common Causes of Funeral Home Litigation
After losing a loved one, the surviving family will place their trust in a funeral home and cemetery to respectfully care for their departed loved one’s remains. This includes honest, diligent business practices as well as properly handling remains, caskets, or funeral vaults. Some examples of behaviors that may warrant funeral home litigation include:

  • Breach of fiduciary duty. The funeral home has a responsibility to follow the agreement for service drawn up between the family and the mortuary. A breach of fiduciary duty can include misuse of client funds, dishonest estimates, or any other negligent financial oversight.
  • Mistreatment of remains. The funeral home has a moral and legal obligation to respectfully handle the remains of the deceased. Embalming errors, cremation errors, mixing up bodies, or improper storage of remains are a few examples of this.
  • Negligence in burial. This can include disinterment, delayed or refused interment, damage to the casket or vault, errors in burial site location, or switching a burial site without approval from the family. This can include theft of a deceased person’s jewelry, clothing, or personal effects as well as internal organs, which some people attempt to steal and sell on the black market.
  • Fraud or bad faith. The funeral home should conduct their operations professionally and provide reasonable and transparent billing. Charging a customer for embalming but not actually performing the procedure is a fraudulent breach of fiduciary duty. Performing certain mortuary services without appropriate certification or business licenses is another bad faith business practice that might lead to a lawsuit.

If a funeral home has betrayed your trust as a client, it’s essential to find reliable legal representation to discuss your options for legal recourse against the responsible parties. While some types of funeral home misconduct may warrant criminal charges, such as organ theft or fraud, other issues will typically lead to personal injury lawsuits.

Negligence in Death Care

Proving negligence in a death care case generally revolves around the same concepts as a typical personal injury lawsuit. The plaintiff will need to prove the defendant breached a duty of care resulting in damages to the plaintiff. A funeral home has a duty of care to provide respectful and professional death care services. When it needlessly disregards this obligation, plaintiffs can seek several types of compensation through a personal injury lawsuit.

Economic damages in death care lawsuits typically include any costs associated with corrective actions resulting from the defendant’s negligence. For example, if a funeral home mismatched the remains of two different people, it may need to later exhume them to correct the mistake. This is very distressful for their surviving loved ones, and the family should not absorb the costs of fixing the funeral home’s mistakes. Other economic damages could include replacement of a damaged casket, grave marker, or headstone, as well as lost income if correcting the bungled funeral caused any of the plaintiffs to miss work. Plaintiffs may also sue for non-economic damages for their pain and suffering after enduring such an experience.

Cemetery Scams in Houston

If a funeral home or cemetery has misled your family about any aspect of a loved one’s death care services, a reliable attorney will help you hold it accountable. Some cemeteries engage in fraudulent practices to boost revenue, preying on unsuspecting customers during a very sensitive time. Such scams could include:

  • Wrongful cremation.
  • Extraneous charges, such as coercing a customer into purchasing a casket for a direct cremation.
  • Failure to abide by the deceased’s last wishes, such as cremating a person who wished for casket burial.
  • Selling plots to more than one family. The logic behind this is that many customers will prepay for cemetery plots, but may not require the use of them for many years. The cemetery may attempt to sell one plot to multiple customers in hopes of shuffling them around later.
  • Desecration of grave sites.

When dealing with the loss of a loved one, you should be treated with sympathy, respect, honesty and good faith by the funeral home during your time of mourning. Moreover, your loved one is entitled to the utmost respect and dignity. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. If your family’s trust has been broken by a negligent funeral home or cemetery owner, we can help. If your deceased loved one’s remains have been abused in any way or the memory of your loved one has been dishonored, we want to help you.