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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
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Decision Over Faulty Casket Upsets Son |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 21 June 2005 |
HAWESVILLE, Ky. - Sherrol Sweeney has been dead and buried in the city cemetery at Lewisport, Ky., for nearly four years, but his son, Alan, is still troubled by his father's funeral.
On Aug. 31, 2001, the funeral director and pallbearers were removing his father's casket when something went wrong. Pulling the wooden casket from the hearse, the bottom of the coffin came loose, allowing the departed's torso to drop down. The casket was not entirely out of the hearse. If it hadn't been for that fact, the son said, the father's body would have fallen onto the ground.
David Spear, owner of Taylor Raymond Spear Funeral Home at Lewisport, remembered the incident, too. In a court deposition he said, "I heard a pop. I felt a pain in both of my feet, and I heard a scream." The family filed a lawsuit against the casket manufacturer.
At the end of a two-day trial in late May in Hancock Circuit Court at Hawesville, they walked away empty handed when they couldn't meet the requirement of Kentucky law of proving the casket manufacturer intentionally produced a faulty product.
"It's just been eating me alive, how something like this could happen," said Sweeney, 50, a union boilermaker from Tell City, Ind. "This has caused a lot of pain and a lot of problems with family members who had to view this, and what I'm trying to get across to people is that things like this can happen, but don't look forward to it coming out in your favor."
The person the funeral director heard scream was Sweeney's older sister, Suzanne, Sweeney said during a recent discussion of the incident, the litigation and the trial.
The funeral service had been conducted, he said, and the family and mourners had gone to the cemetery. He had been watching pallbearers begin to remove the casket from the hearse, but he turned away to look for other family members when "I heard my older sister scream like somebody had run a knife into her."
"I turned around," Sweeney said, "and seen my father's head land between the feet of David Spear.
"Everybody was in pure disbelief and shock," Sweeney said. "All I could do was look. Finally, they got themselves together enough to raise the bottom up with my father on it and get it back into the hearse."
Spear, who declined to discuss the incident last week, described it this way in his deposition: "I then asked a wonderful bunch of pallbearers to help me. I held the top shell of the casket as they brought the bottom up, and we took it back, almost completely back into the funeral coach."
Sweeney said the funeral director asked family members if they wanted to delay the burial until another day, but because of relatives and friends who had traveled to attend the funeral, they decided to proceed with the burial.
Spear and the pallbearers returned to the funeral home and placed Sweeney's body into a different casket. They then returned to the cemetery and completed the burial.
Sweeney said the incident robbed his family of the usual experience of visiting with friends and family after the funeral and burial.
"It's not being buried with dignity. It took away the whole mood. I don't remember anything about the burial service other than staring at the ground," Sweeney said.
Aurora Casket Co. of Aurora, Ind., which supplied the casket to the Taylor Raymond Spear Funeral Home, replaced the damaged one with a more expensive model. And Spear's funeral home did not charge the family for any of the $6,500 funeral.
Eventually, though, the family - Sweeney's widow, Alan Sweeney and his two brothers and sister - filed a lawsuit for damages against the funeral home, Aurora Casket Co., and Victoriaville Caskets Ltd., a Victoriaville, Canada, company that had manufactured the casket for Aurora.
Represented by Owensboro, Ky., attorney Charles Wible, the lawsuit was styled as a "tort of outrage," for outrageous conduct. In the filing, the lawsuit was described as "not a tort of personal injury in the traditional sense because the heart of the tort involves emotional distress. This tort represents an invasion of the dignity of the plaintiffs."
Neither Wible nor attorneys who represented the two casket companies responded to requests for comments regarding the incident or the trial."
David Spear and the Taylor Raymond Spear Funeral Home petitioned successfully to be dismissed from the litigation.
"We didn't feel like he had any involvement," Sweeney said.
The casket companies offered the family members a settlement of $3,000 each, Sweeney said. They rejected that offer and proposed instead $250,000 for each sibling, for a total of $1 million.
Sweeney's stepmother accepted a settlement offer and dismissed her portion of the litigation.
Sweeney said Wible urged them to settle with the company also, but they chose to proceed to trial.
"They made a big deal in court that we wanted $1 million, but we would have settled for a lot less than that. It really wasn't the money," Sweeney said.
"It's hard for me to come up with the right words about this." he said, "but people need to know it's hard to fight these big companies."
"It's bad enough to have something like that happen, but it's even worse the way the law reads. Since we didn't receive any type of personal injury, we weren't really affected to the point they felt we needed any type of settlement," he said.
"We couldn't prove the company maliciously and intentionally built that casket," he said. Sweeney said people familiar with the case were in "disbelief" the casket companies won the court verdict, "but they (jurors) had no other choice but to do what they did simply because the way the judge laid out the instructions."
Other members of his family have seemed to achieved "some sort of closure," Sweeney said. "But, me, I'm not satisfied."
Source: Courier & Press
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” Edna St. Vincent Millay
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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