A case that was filed on Tuesday says that last year, a funeral home in New York sent the wrong body to Guatemala to be buried.
In their case against Rivera Funeral Home, Elder Emilio Garcia Umul’s family says that the funeral home sent the body of a 96-year-old woman instead of Garcia Umul’s, who was 39 years old.
According to a news statement about the suit, the family found the mistake while watching a livestream of the May funeral service in Guatemala.
“What they did was wrong,” Leonor Valente, who is the mother of Garcia Umul’s kids, told NBC New York. It was hard for me to say goodbye to him, but then I realized I wasn’t really saying goodbye to him. It was someone else.”
This is the second time since October that Rivera Funeral Home has been sued for allegedly making a mistake with a delivery. Both suits were brought by the same law company.
The most recent lawsuit didn’t show up in an online case list Tuesday night, and it wasn’t clear if the funeral home had a lawyer in the case.
A lawyer who was supposed to be representing Rivera Funeral Home in the first lawsuit did not answer right away to a message Tuesday night.
The suit says that Carmen Maldonado’s body was sent to Guatemala by mistake. The first claim was brought by Maldonado’s family in October.
A story from NBC New York said that Maldonado’s family was able to bring her back to Ecuador and bury her there.
In response to the first lawsuit, the funeral home said that the claims in that suit were false. The case is still going on.
The claim that was filed on Tuesday says that Garcia Umul’s body “was not properly prepared for transport and was carelessly left in New York.”
The family was “horrified, saddened, sickened, and dismayed” to learn that his body had been left in New York during the livestream of the funeral, the suit says.
The suit asks for unspecified damages and claims negligence, mental distress, breach of contract, and loss of sepulcher. New York law gives people who have lost a loved one the right to have their body kept and buried.
