It sounds like something out of a nightmare, is how Detroit television reporter Noelle Friel described a grieving familys ordeal after a funeral home allegedly cremated the wrong woman and placed a stranger in their mothers casket.
The case centers on 64-year-old Kimberlly Moore, a mother of five and grandmother of 28, who died following a battle with endometrial cancer. According to WND, the familys grief was compounded when they arrived at Hutchison Funeral Home in Detroit expecting a dignified farewell and instead encountered a disturbing mix-up that no family should face.
Moores daughter, Bianca Robinson, went to the funeral home ahead of Friday evenings viewing to apply her mothers makeup, a final act of love and respect. When staff unzipped the body bag, she immediately noticed something was wrong, recalling: When he unzipped the bag, I looked at the toe, and I was like, it's not a mole on her toe, and I turned around, and I looked at him. I said this is not my mama, sir. He said I'm so sorry.
Robinson says that is when she was told her mother had already been cremated by mistake. He said your mom must've been cremated when she first got here. Because it was two ladies that came here when your mom came in, and we must've cremated her. I said, 'How do you make a mistake like that?" Robinson said.
Her brother, Byron Moore, was equally stunned by what he saw in the casket. It's a lady in there with our mother's dress on and her hair on and her makeup on, everything, and it's not our mother, he said, adding, We're trying to understand how could you be so careless to do such a horrible thing?
Funeral home spokesman Mario Morrow declined to address specifics but promised an internal review of the incident. We're going to get to the bottom of it, and if the funeral home is found at fault, we're going to make the family whole. It's just a bad situation, Morrow said.
For Robinson, assurances are not enough as she still does not know who the other woman is, nor where her mothers remains are. We don't have answers. We don't have a viewing. What do we have? We don't even have her ashes? Somebody please tell us something. We need some help. This is crazy, she said, raising hard questions about basic competence and accountability in an industry families trust at their most vulnerable moments.
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