Delivery of Wrong Body to Funeral Prompts Suit

Midway through the funeral Mass for the young wife and mother struck down by leukemia, the call came to the Santa Ana church: The funeral home was terribly sorry, but it had sent the wrong body.

When word filtered out to grieving husband Ricardo Sandoval, he flipped up the drape covering the casket and realized that it was indeed not the coffin he had ordered. In the midst of the service, workers for MacDougall Family Mortuary came to the church, wheeling the correct body down the aisle and wheeling out the body of a stranger.

In a lawsuit filed this week in Orange County Superior Court, Sandoval is demanding unspecified damages for the emotional distress he says he and the couple’s two young children, ages 2 and 5, suffered.

He wonders, he says as he fights back tears, whether the saying of a Mass when his wife’s body was not there changes what will happen to her in the hereafter.

“With my beliefs, when you do the last blessings, the body is supposed to be there for the whole ceremony, not half,” said Sandoval, of Santa Ana.

“When the [first] casket arrived the priest blessed it. What if the first blessing is the only one that counts? It’s going to be an unanswered question for the rest of my life.”

Mike Ross, the manager of MacDougall, concedes his firm’s error. But it was an honest mistake, Ross said, one that the funeral home corrected as soon as it found out and apologized for sincerely. He said the home tried to make amends for the mistake by refusing to accept payment for its services.

“I did apologize directly for it,” Ross said. “I will admit that there was a mistake made and we were very sorry and I expressed it to Mr. Sandoval personally. We did correct things as soon as we possibly could.”

Ross said he is surprised that Sandoval is suing the funeral home because there seemed to be no malice between them and all charges for the services were waived.

In his 17 years in the funeral industry, this is the first time anything like this has happened, he said.

“It is a very unfortunate situation, no question about it,” he said. “I don’t feel good about the whole thing and no one would.”

Maria Sandoval was found to have leukemia in May 1996. At first, treatment put her in remission. Meanwhile, her husband took on two jobs to pay for his wife’s medical costs: his current job as a warehouse manager in Tustin and another at a discount store. But in December the cancer struck again.

Maria Sandoval was 28 when she died last month, leaving Ricardo, 29, to take care of their two children, Ricardo Jr., 2, and Christina, 5.

Ricardo Sandoval chose MacDougall Family Mortuary because it was located conveniently in his home city, he said. He had noticed the name when passing by the business on 1st Street, and it was recommended by friends.

On the day of the closed-casket funeral, the lawsuit alleges, the funeral home was about 15 minutes late delivering the casket. By the time the casket arrived, draped, everyone was seated in the church, according to the lawsuit.

Sandoval did not notice that the casket was an ornately decorated silver casket, unlike the plain brown metal casket he had purchased for Maria.

“I could see through the drape and I thought it was too shiny,” Sandoval recalled. “I thought for a second that it wasn’t the right casket because Maria’s wasn’t shiny. But I thought it had to be the right one.”

Sandoval said a friend attending the funeral told him about the mix-up. The friend had overheard church workers talking about the mortuary’s call.

“A friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘That’s not Maria,’ ” he said.

But by then the funeral Mass, blessings and prayers were underway. Sandoval said he left the church distressed.

Even when the correct casket was brought in, Sandoval could not overcome his doubts, wondering if the mortuary had put his wife’s remains into the wrong casket. At the graveside, he said, he insisted that the casket be unsealed so that he could see. It was indeed his wife’s body.

“We’d already cried, and later someone comes and tells you that’s someone else’s body,” he said. “You’re thinking your loved one is out there, somewhere.”