Story Archive

Cold-Hearted

Just before services were to begin at Stevens Brothers Funeral Home in West Palm Beach, Fla., Marvelle Freeman looked into her mother’s casket — and saw the body of a stranger dressed in her mother’s clothes. “We get here today for her wake, and it’s not her,” an understandably upset Freeman said. “They have somebody else in all of her belongings.” The funeral home said that it was an honest mistake: they had two clients named Mary come in at about the same time, and got them mixed up. Naturally, they said they would rectify their mistake, but relatives were still upset. “To take her undergarments and put on somebody else, and then take them off her, and put them back on [my sister] ... Come on! Come on!” said the dead woman’s sister, Susan Williams. “That’s not right.” (RC/South Florida Sun-Sentinel) ...Indeed: she could get some sort of disease.