After five years of uncertainty, Tonya Leach and Eddie Squire said they can finally lay their late unborn son to rest. A jury in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court on Friday awarded Leach and Squire more than $750,000 in damages for the mishandling of their son's remains in 2001. "We didn't want to do anything with him until this was over," said Leach, 35, wiping away tears afterward, outside the courtroom. "Now we can have a memorial for him and put all of this behind us."

They sued the E.F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home for negligence based on their suspicions that morticians had mixed up the cremated ashes of their stillborn child with other people's remains.

A pathologist found fragments of teeth and pulverized adult bones mixed with the remnants of the infant returned to the couple in a cardboard box. He also said the couple received far more ashes than he would have expected from the cremation of a 1-pound fetus.

Boyd's lawyer, George Zucco, told the jury that the funeral home did nothing wrong. He suspects the eight jurors were swayed by sympathy for the parents. The pieces of cremated adults could be attributed to incomplete cleaning of the crematorium, and most of the ashes were from the pine box that held the unborn infant, he said.

"I believe they followed all of the rules and regulations," Zucco said. "The statute allows for some commingling of ashes."

He said he would talk with his clients before deciding whether to file an appeal.

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