A New Jersey family has filed a lawsuit against a funeral home that allegedly placed the wrong woman in their mother’s casket.
RELATED STORIES: Texas Funeral Home Offers Free Services For Families Who Lost Loved Ones In Elementary School Shooting
The family of Kyung Ja Kim,93, said she was mixed up with another woman with the same last name at the Blackley Central Funeral Home in Ridgefield. During the memorial service, mourners reportedly didn’t recognize the woman’s body since she was dressed in Kim’s clothes, and documents claim the embalming process involved heavy makeup, fake hair, and a Botox-like filler for her face.
According to the New York Post, Kummi Kim said her mother’s dentures were placed under the corpse of the other woman, and noticed something wrong after checking the body. “When she opened the casket, I told them, ‘This is not my mom.’ And she didn’t say any word about it. She was so much younger looking,” she explained.
RELATED STORIES: Family Sues Funeral Home After The Wrong Person Was Buried In Mom’s Plot
While the casket was being lowered at the cemetery in Valhalla, New York, the funeral director showed Kummi a picture of her mother and didn’t explain why she was about to take the casket out.
“She came to me and showed picture. ‘This is the lady at the funeral home. Is this your mom?’ and I collapsed. She ran away without saying any word about why she was taking the casket out.”
The funeral director reportedly told the family that neither of the bodies had identification tags, but their attorney, Michael Maggiano, argued that the funeral home should have them to prevent future incidents.
“Kim is not an unusual name. And so there should be identifiers so that we do not confuse one Kim with another Kim,”
After the incident, the funeral home swapped the clothing and bodies, but relatives from Korea could not attend the second memorial service.
“The last memory of her was very painful and disturbing and horrible,”
However, the funeral home offered to refund the Kim family $9,000, but it was declined. The lawsuit accuses the funeral home of negligence, battery, and denial of peaceful interment and asks for $50 million in damages. Yoon-sung Kim, Kummi’s brother, says the money will go to their mother’s church in Leonia if they win the lawsuit.
A similar incident occurred last year when a family from Long Island, New York, discovered that someone else’s casket was placed in their mother’s burial plot. Sadie Williams’ was left unburied and naked on at the funeral home, and her family filed a lawsuit for $88 million. “I said, ‘Mom has a mole.’ I just kept picking out different things. He stood at the top of the steps of the funeral home, laughing, going, ‘Oh, I hear that all the time. They tell me. People say that all the time. The embalming fluid smooths them out,’” one of her children explained.
“Every single time I think about it, all I can see is my mother on that cold slab, naked … and he showed no concern when he opened that door and I saw her, just stark naked on the table, just sitting there, like she was waiting for me to find her,”