Yes, you can sue a cemetery for burial mistakes in Texas. Funerals and other life celebration services often involve a wake, funeral, burial or cremation. They offer grieving loved ones a brief moment to reconnect and make peace before a person’s body is interred forever in the Earth.
Funerals are a sacred part of the grieving process. They provide closure. However, negligent funeral service providers can interrupt the grieving process and can cause severe pain and suffering. It’s important that people who are subject to this kind of negligence know that they can sue for damages. Whether or not you’re awarded a settlement depends in cemetery negligence cases depends on who was responsible for the negligent behavior and how well you can prove their negligence.
Let’s take a look at how the funeral industry works, some common burial mistakes, and what you can do to get restitution for your pain and suffering in the event that a cemetery makes burial mistakes that cause pain, suffering, and unexpected expenses.
Funeral Industry Basics
There are 3 basic types of funeral service providers: crematories, cemeteries, and funeral homes. Sometimes, these are all under one umbrella, and sometimes they are separate individual entities. In the case of burial mistakes, you need to find out which provider was responsible for the negligent act.
You might sue all three if they are separate providers, or you might only bring a claim against only the licensed funeral home professional that was responsible for overseeing the embalming process. It all depends on your particular case.
Common Cemetery Mistakes
There are a number of cemetery mishaps that can turn a funeral into a painful burial mistake. For example, there is a startlingly common trend with some service providers in Texas where cemeteries will place bodies into the wrong graves. This requires disinterment (digging the grave up) and moving it to the correct grave. This causes tremendous pain and cognitive dissonance for surviving loved ones.
Another cemetery blunder is when two bodies are placed in the same gravesite. It can happen when cemeteries employ negligent personnel or mismanage their business. Or what if the cemetery has no security or maintenance schedule? When you go to bring flowers to your loved one’s gravesite and the grave has been vandalized, who is responsible for protecting it?
All of these cemetery burial mistakes (and many others) cause pain and suffering on top of your pain and suffering. Grieving is never easy, even without negligent service providers. The grieving process is made infinitely more difficult when funeral providers interrupt the process and set new, painful memories of a botched burial deep into your subconscious. This kind of suffering calls for restitution and legal action.
But before you decide if you should sue a cemetery or not, it’s always a good idea to reach out to funeral home negligence experts. They can help gather the relevant information about the incident and the providers involved, and then map out the best path to secure damages for your pain and suffering. To get the process started, reach out for a risk-free case evaluation.
Our seasoned funeral home negligence experts can determine if your case warrants legal action to get monetary damages, future costs, emotional distress, and punitive damages. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you are struggling with moving on after seeing your loved one mistreated by funeral service providers. Closure and justice are closer than you think. Contact Malley Law Firm today.
