Last August, Marilyn Jones and her husband Robert departed from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on an eight-day Caribbean cruise aboard the Celebrity Equinox.
The couple from Bonifay, Florida were just two days out of their trip when 79-year-old Robert Jones died of a heart attack.
Celebrity Cruises presented Mrs. Jones with two options, in line with a federal lawsuit she filed against the cruise line this week: disembark along with her husband’s body in San Juan, PR, or conform to store it within the ship’s morgue until she returns to Florida six days later.
She decided to remain on the ship. But when a funeral home attendant and a Broward County Sheriff’s deputy boarded a plane in Fort Lauderdale to select up Mr. Jones’s body, they found it had been moved from the mortuary to a cooler on one other floor, in line with a lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court States for the Southern District of Florida.
Kept at insufficient temperature, the body “appallingly decomposed”, the lawsuit said, stopping the family from opening the coffin at his wake and funeral.
Jones, who was married to her husband for 55 years, and her family are searching for a jury trial and at the very least $1 million in damages.
In a press release, Celebrity Cruises declined to comment, citing the “sensitivity of the alleged facts and respect for the family.”
The lawsuit that was reports the Miami New Times, said ship crew members told Mrs. Jones that if she disembarked in San Juan, there was a “50/50 shot” that the coroner’s office there would take her husband’s body for autopsy before transferring it to the funeral home. She was told she would must stay in Puerto Rico along with his body and organize herself to take it and herself back to Florida.
Assured that the Equinox was properly equipped to soundly transport her husband’s body back to Fort Lauderdale, Mrs. Jones, who was 78 on the time and suddenly traveling alone, gave the crew permission to store his body within the ship’s mortuary and agreed to remain on on board for the remaining of the voyage, the lawsuit says.
“She was given a really difficult alternative,” Thomas Carey, the lawyer representing Mrs Jones, her two daughters and three grandchildren, who’re also plaintiffs within the lawsuit, said in an interview on Friday. “Logically, she selected the ship’s mortuary,” he said when she was assured that it had working facilities.
“At some unknown point,” he said, “someone discovered that the refrigeration wasn’t working.”
When a funeral home attendant and a sheriff’s deputy stated that Mr. Jones’s body was not within the mortuary but had been moved to the beverage cooler, the lawsuit said it was “immediately clear” that it was in a sophisticated stage of decomposition. said the lawsuit. The body, it was written, expanded with the gas, and “his skin turned green.”
The fridge was meant for things like sodas, Mr. Carey said, and wasn’t cold enough to carry a human body.
Like all cruise ships, Celebrity Equinox, which is registered in Malta and might accommodate as much as 2,852 people, it should have a mortuary because deaths on board aren’t unusual, said Hendrik Keijer, a marine operations expert who served as a captain on Holland America Line cruise ships for 10 years.
“Unfortunately, that is the last vacation for some people,” said Keijer. “That’s why the morgues are on board.”
Jacob Munch, a maritime lawyer who also represents Ms Jones in her lawsuit, said cruise lines have an obligation to take care of morgues.
“It’s their responsibility to ensure that they’re working properly,” he said in an interview, “especially in a fragile situation like this. He turns to them for advice.”
If Mrs. Jones had known that there was no working mortuary on board the ship, she would have chosen to take her husband’s body from the ship in Puerto Rico. Celebrity Cruises’ handling of the matter was “reckless and careless”.
Ms Jones and her family are “devastated” and can fight for recovery, Mr Carey said.
“For the remaining of her life,” he said, “she’ll must give it some thought.”
