An Alabama funeral home is under investigation after two families accused them of presenting them with the wrong bodies to bury.
The first incident happened Aug. 30 when Lakishia Williams went to Memorial Funeral Home in Prichard, Alabama, expecting to see her grandmother, Dollie Williams, in her casket, WKRG-TV reported.
“When I walked in and approached the body in the casket, I had informed the gentleman that wasn’t my grandmother,” Williams recounted to the station. “And I asked him, I say, ‘Did you get the wrong body from the hospital?’ And he assured me that was my grandmother.”
Williams said that the employee insisted that the woman wearing her grandmother’s clothes was her grandmother, and “literally had an answer for everything.” When Williams asked why her grandmother’s skin was so dark, she said the employee told her it was a “type of tint that brings out the natural glow,” according to the report
On Sept. 5, Lula Campbell-Durgin said she had the same problem when she was expecting to see her mother, Cora Mae Campbell, in the casket, and instead found someone else.
“I pulled my phone out and went to—oh, I got many, many pictures of my mom,” Campbell-Durgin told the station. “‘This is my mother! This is my mom.’ He got my phone. He looked at the phone, and he looked at the woman, he looked at the phone, looked at the woman. And I say, ‘OK?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s your mother.'”
Both funerals continued as planned, and the bodies were buried. But days later, the Williams family said they were called by the funeral home who said they made a mistake.
The family took to Facebook to share what had happened, which is where Campbell’s granddaughter April Henry saw the photo of the woman they said said was buried in her place, which she identified as her grandmother Cora Mae.
The funeral home dug up Campbell’s grave on Sept. 6 and gave her to her family to be reburied, but the family said she already appeared to have started decaying. Henry told WKRG in tears, “This is our granny that we had to see like that.”
The Williams family said Dollie Williams was never buried, and a second funeral service was held for her on Sept. 16. The third body buried in Campbell’s place was not identified.
Memorial Funeral Home employees told the station that everything the families told the station was “false” and denied all accusations. The funeral home is currently under investigation by the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office and the Alabama Board of Funeral Services.
