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Lawsuit Follows Funeral Home Putting The Wrong Corpse In Casket

Funerals are already a difficult experience to deal with–but when something goes wrong, the whole situation is automatically made ten times worse.

That’s what one New York City man experienced after the passing of his mother, due to the alleged mishap of the funeral home he hired. The Queens resident is now making claims that an East Elmhurst funeral home that he hired to prepare his mother’s remains instead swapped her body for a stranger’s. This is all according to a lawsuit filed by the grieving son following the very disheartening mishap.

Earl Straker says that he had absolutely no idea anything was wrong with the arrangements for his late mother Helen until he walked into the viewing at Cobbs Funeral Chapels on May 5, a few months back.

It was there, at the service with the rest of his family, friends, and loved ones, that he first saw the body in the casket–and that’s when he immediately realized something was wrong.

Rightfully expecting to see the face of his dearly departed, 90-year-old mother, the 61-year-old son Earl was met with something else entirely. Instead, the poor son looked down on “an unknown corpse [that] was prepared as if it was the corpse of the decedent, Helen Straker,” he alleges in the Queens Supreme Court lawsuit.

The wrong corpse being present for the funeral of his late mother left Earl Straker with “mental distress of a very serious nature,” he alleged in the lawsuit.

It is currently unclear what happened to Helen Straker’s remains, along with why or how the funeral home presumably mixed up two of their bodies.