A California family was horrified to find a stranger’s body on display at a memorial service for their loved one — and the ordeal was enough to cause a relative to suffer a heart attack in the chapel, kin said.
The family of Joey Espinosa, 44, who recently died of heart failure, was attending his memorial service at Forest Lawn Covina Hills funeral home when they discovered the mortuary had put the wrong body in the casket.
“They didn’t know where my nephew’s body was,” Espinosa’s aunt, Laura Levario, told CBS Los Angeles.
Funeral home staff ushered the family into a different room at the facility after the apparent mix-up, but the body on display there wasn’t Espinosa’s, either.
The upheaval was so unnerving that Levario’s husband collapsed of a heart attack in the chapel, only to wake up three days later on life support in the hospital.
“It’s the worst experience we’ve ever had,” he said.
Forest Lawn chalked up the mortifying mishap to a “scheduling error” — and adding insult to injury, offered the family a mere $200 in compensation — just 1% of the nearly $20,000 funeral cost.
The family is now suing the funeral home for emotional distress and negligence.
“Instead of mourning and remembering their loved one, they are searching for a body,” said Elvis Tran, the family’s lawyer.
“When you’re spending that much money on a place like Forest Lawn, you would think they would do things properly,” he said of the facility, which boasts of offering “significant” artwork and “spectacular” grounds on its website.
The funeral home was eventually able to locate Espinosa’s body and begin the service after over an hour of flubs.
Though rare, similar tragic mistakes by funeral homes do happen.
In October, a funeral home in Camden, NJ, was sued by a family after it displayed the wrong body draped in the deceased loved one’s clothing.
The man’s kin accused the funeral home of negligence in the handling of human remains, among other claims.
That same month, a bungling NYC funeral home that was already under fire for losing bodies shipped off the remains of a 96-year-old Queens grandmother to Guatemala instead of her native Ecuador, leading to yet another lawsuit.
The post Funeral home displays wrong body at memorial service, leading relative to suffer heart attack: kin appeared first on New York Post.
