A couple is suing two funeral homes after their veteran son’s brain was returned in an unmarked cardboard box that was leaking “biohazardous liquid,” a lawsuit alleges.
Lawrence and Abbey Butler are suing Nix & Nix Funeral Homes in Pennsylvania and Southern Cremations & Funeral in Georgia for the “mishandling” of the remains of their son Timothy Garlington, a Marine veteran who died in November 2023. He died in Georgia, but was originally from Pennsylvania.
In November, the couple hired Southern Cremations & Funerals to transport their son’s remains to Nix & Nix Funeral Home in Philadelphia. A week later, Lawrence Butler picked up a “white, unmarked cardboard box” that the couple thought contained their son’s personal belongings, the filing states.
The box began to smell and leak fluids in Butler’s car. When the couple tried to remove the box, “biohazardous liquid spilled” onto them, the lawsuit alleges. They reached out to the funeral homes to learn that the box contained their late son’s brain.
“The family has been destroyed twice,” their lawyer, L. Chris Stewart, told Fox 5.
The couple says they suffered “serious mental and emotional distress” as a result of the funeral homes’ mishandling of their son’s remains, the suit stated. It called the defendants’ conduct “extreme and outrageous.”
They’ve accused the defendants of negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims, for an unspecified amount in damages.
“It was, and it is still, in my heart that I got in my car and I smelled death,” Lawrence Butler told the Associated Press.
“I had to get rid of that car,” he added. “I just couldn’t stand the idea that the remains were in that car.”
Stewart told the AP that after speaking to several other funeral homes, he learned the brain is not typically “separated from [the] body in that fashion and shipped in that fashion.” In the circumstances that the body parts are separated, they are labeled as a biohazard.
“There’s no excuse, there is zero excuse for this type of error to happen. For the Georgia funeral home, Southern Cremations, to ship unmarked, bio-hazardous material. For the funeral home here in Philadelphia to hand the parents an unmarked box, not examined, not on a list of the inventory that was the personal items, to not check it,” Stewart told the AP. “They have not received a single apology to this day from any funeral home.”
The owner of Nix & Nix Funeral Homes said that his team didn’t know that the box contained brain matter and noted that the state board did a thorough investigation and cleared them of wrongdoing.
“Any body parts should be in the body. I don’t understand why they would send his brains in a box, a regular box,” Julian Nix, the owner of Nix and Nix Funeral Home, told Fox 5.
“We immediately reported it to the state board and the medical examiner for inspection,” Nix told the outlet. “When the state board investigated, they said that we did everything correct.”
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