Jury Awards Mom in California Coroner Cremation Case

You can read an article here from Sacramento’s CBS Local which explains a jury award just last Friday that amounted to $605,000 victory for the mother of an infant cremated without her expressed wishes.

The Los Angeles County based case actually put the damages to the mother at $1.1 million but also said that the mother, Yvette Diaz was 45% negligent for what happened.  According to the article, Diaz gave birth in May 2016 and the child died the next day.  The coroner’s office cremated the body in August of that year – 3 months later –  without, what the jury decided, giving proper notice of the upcoming cremation to Diaz.

Again according to the article, Diaz argued that she was denied the opportunity of giving her child what she termed a “Catholic burial”.

Another article here from NBC Los Angeles gives more information on the case including the LA County Coroner’s explanation of how they had tried to notify Ms. Diaz.

Funeral Director Daily take:  I recently wrote an article on cremation protocol that you can read here.  As more and more cremations are being done and our society is becoming more litigious, it makes absolutely no sense for a private death care business or a county coroner’s operation that performs cremations to operate a crematory without an absolutely iron-clad method of operations and best practices that will eliminate these types of problems.  To not have this in your business operation procedure is just asking for a lawsuit to happen.

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