RIVERSIDE FUNERAL HOME ABUSE ATTORNEY

If you believe your family has been a victim of funeral home abuse, contact our Riverside personal injury lawyers to protect you and your family’s legal rights. With multiple offices located in Riverside, Anaheim, Irvine, Los Angeles, El Segundo, and San Diego, our funeral home abuse lawyers represent grieving families across Southern California. For more information or to schedule a complimentary consultation with an experienced Riverside funeral home abuse attorney, please call 888-848-5084.

What You Need To Know About Funeral Home Negligence

Death is a sensitive, painful issue, but it is something that most people will face at least once in their lifetime. All of us must come to grips with a family member or friend passing away at some point. When the death of a loved one occurs, a mourning and grieving family often isn’t thinking clearly and relies on a mortuary or funeral home to handle all the necessary steps from the time of death to burial. This includes organizing the funeral service, taking care of the crematory or cemetery arrangements, publishing the obituary in the local newspaper, and offering professional and honest advice as to the available options for the deceased.

Families generally assume the funeral home will act appropriately and carry out their duty in a respectful and caring manner. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. Negligence does occur, even in this most sensitive time for a family. Carelessness and intentional negligence are more common than we’d like to believe. If you suspect that you have been a victim of funeral home negligence, you should seek out legal counsel immediately.

If you are wondering how a funeral home could act negligently, you might be surprised at the number of ways things can and do go wrong. The National Funeral Directors Association fosters research to develop and maintain a high level of service in the mortuary industry to help ensure that a high level of ethical practices is observed, but they cannot monitor every funeral home or mortuary.

Negligence resulting in loss is a serious issue, whether in a funeral home or elsewhere, but it’s especially harmful when it affects grieving families who have recently lost loved ones. It is vitally important to address funeral home negligence legally to not only recover for losses you have suffered but to ensure that this deplorable conduct will not continue.

Can I sue for Mortuary or Funeral Home Negligence?

A mortuary or funeral home is contracted to care for bodies entrusted to them. If something adverse happens, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the family can sue for negligence. 

To prove the mortuary or funeral home was negligent in some way, families must show:

• Duty: the mortuary or funeral home had a duty to perform a certain level of services
• Breach: the mortuary or funeral home breached that duty by acting or failing to act in a certain way
• Causation: That breach caused loss to the family
• Harm (or damages): The breach of duty resulted in financial damages to the family or emotional/psychological pain and suffering. 

Families who sue for mortuary or funeral home negligence commonly recover for actual past expenses, reasonably foreseeable future costs, and emotional distress.

Reasons To Sue A Funeral Home

Funeral home abuse has become so common that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) instituted new rules and guidelines to protect families from abuse. The FTC cautions families planning funerals to make sure that they receive everything they have contracted for. In addition, they should make sure they are paying only for the items and services they need. The FTC warns families to do the following:

• Whenever possible, make funeral plans in advance to avoid expensive purchasing decisions when distracted by grief.
• Know that, by law, funeral homes cannot charge a casket-handling fee if a casket is purchased somewhere other than the funeral home caring for their loved one.
• Carefully check each item on the invoice provided by the funeral home to ensure that the charges match the agreed-upon prices
• Ensure that the funeral home provides the law or laws required for the mandatory purchase of some items and services.
• Be aware that funeral homes must disclose in writing that families have a right to choose what happens with a loved one’s remains if they choose not to embalm them.

Common reasons to sue a funeral home:

• Failure to store the body properly.
• Failure to properly embalm the body.
• Preparing the wrong body for viewing.
• Losing cremated remains.
• Cremating the wrong body.
• Carelessness in the transport of the body.
• Theft of personal property.
• Allowing an unlicensed practitioner to handle the embalming of your loved one
• Stealing and selling organs.
• Selling a higher quality casket and substituting it with a lesser quality one.
• Placed the body in the wrong cemetery plot.
• Putting two or more bodies into a single coffin.

Contact a Top-Rated Riverside Funeral Home Abuse Attorney

If you believe that a mortuary or funeral home has engaged in improper treatment of your loved one’s remains, a staff member has acted in an unethical manner to defraud your family, or that your family or your deceased loved one has been the victim of any other type of abuse from a funeral home or mortuary, contact the Law Offices of Samer Habbas & Associates.

Our Riverside funeral home abuse attorneys help to grieving families by aggressively pursuing damages against those responsible for the abuse. No amount of damages awarded in court or negotiated through a settlement can mend the grief that families experience, but this compensation can help defray burial costs and other expenses the family has incurred. 

With multiple offices located in Riverside, Anaheim, Irvine, Los Angeles, El Segundo, and San Diego, our funeral home negligence attorneys represent grieving families across Southern California. For more information or to schedule a complimentary consultation with an experienced Riverside funeral home abuse lawyer, please call 888-848-5084.