Jury Awards $575,000 Over Mix-Up in Burial

A Superior Court jury Monday awarded $575,000 in damages to the family of Sol Povar, who was mistakenly buried in another man’s grave two years ago.

Sam Povar said the mistake was discovered only 10 minutes before his father’s funeral in the chapel of Mt. Sinai Memorial Park and Mortuary. The body of another elderly Los Angeles man, Sol Makaroff, was in the Povar coffin. The son later found out that his father had already been interred in Makaroff’s grave in Mt. Sinai Memorial Park.

Sam Povar called the jury award “a total victory.”

He and his mother, Sally Povar, 85, filed suit in 1986 against two funeral parlors and the hospital involved.

“I couldn’t tell my mother what had happened, that it wasn’t my father in the casket . . . that would have killed her too,” Povar said. He said the funeral director talked him into closing an empty coffin and going ahead with the service.

“I asked him where my father was; they told me they didn’t know.” Povar said. “They’d lost him.”

In addition to Mt. Sinai, the defendants included Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Glasband-Willen Mortuary, the funeral parlor that buried Povar’s body in an orthodox Jewish ceremony intended for Makaroff.

Identities Confused

Povar and Makaroff both died in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on June 10, 1986, officials reported. While what happened next is not entirely clear, the identities of the two men were somehow confused and the bodies were taken to the wrong funeral parlors, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs and the defense.

A second, parallel suit has been filed by Peggy and Brandon Makaroff, children of Sol Makaroff, naming the same defendants. Instead of being buried within 24 hours, without embalming or cosmetic enhancement as Orthodox ritual dictates, Makaroff’s body was prepared for the open-casket Povar funeral by Mt. Sinai, said Erwin Sobel, attorney for the Makaroffs.

“This was a grotesque mix-up, it was hideous,” Sobel said. The Makaroffs thought they had buried their father. Two days later, after the mistake had been discovered, “the family was called in to make the identification. . . . It was a great emotional shock, beyond description.”

The Makaroff suit is pending.

The Povar trial lasted six weeks. Sam Povar said jurors told him that they had reacted primarily to the callous way the Mt. Sinai funeral parlor staff had treated him and his mother. They had been called down to identify the disinterred body but had not been offered an apology or help with reburial.

The jury, after deliberating for nearly four days, awarded $225,000 to the widow and $350,000 to the son for emotional stress, apportioning the majority of the blame to Mt. Sinai Memorial Park and Mortuary, court officials said.

Cedars-Sinai must pay 4% of the award, according to spokesman Ron Wise, who said, “We would have preferred not to have any apportion of the judgment assigned to us. . . . The nominal amount indicates that the jury felt that Cedars-Sinai’s degree of involvement was minimal.” He could not explain how the bodies ended up at the wrong mortuaries.

Glasband-Willen Mortuary attorney Lou Marlin said his clients were assigned 5% of the responsibility. “We are very pleased with the percentage. . . . We were surprised, but not dismayed by the verdict . . . (reflecting) the jury’s feeling that . . . Mt. Sinai Memorial Park breached their contract, were negligent and bore the greatest percentage . . . in this case.”

Mt. Sinai General Manager Benjamin Dwoskin and the attorney representing the funeral home could not be reached Monday for comment.