COLUMBUS – A Columbus funeral service misplaced a woman’s body and displayed the wrong corpse at the funeral home, her family says in a lawsuit filed in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
Seven relatives of Nivina Cargill filed the lawsuit on Monday against Smoot Funeral Services, which operates out of the Edwards Funeral Home at 1166 Parsons Avenue.
The family has “lost sleep and suffered nightmares as a result of the defendants’ conduct,” according to the lawsuit.
Monique Smoot, who is the director of the funeral service and a defendant in the case, did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.
The lawsuit asks for more than $25,000 in compensatory damages and more than $25,000 in punitive damages, but the action isn’t about money, Cargill’s sister, Pamela Merritt, said on Thursday. “Our whole concern is, we don’t want this to happen to another family.”
Merritt said her sister died of cardiac arrest at age 52 on June 21.
When Merritt and other family members arrived at the funeral home for a private viewing on the evening of July 1, she said, they immediately realized that someone other than her sister was in the casket.
“There was someone else’s loved one wearing my sister’s clothing,” she said.