A Florida woman alleges in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that her husband died aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean and that staff on the luxury liner failed to properly preserve the body, depriving loved ones of a casket funeral. open.
Marilyn Jones, 78, set sail on Aug. 13 aboard the Celebrity Equinox in Fort Lauderdale with her husband of 55 years, Robert Jones, 79, according to the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The liner was scheduled for an eight-day excursion to ports in the Eastern Caribbean, including San Juan, Puerto Rico, according to the lawsuit.
Marilyn Jones was listed as a plaintiff, as were her two daughters, an adult granddaughter and two minor grandsons. The defendant in the lawsuit is Celebrity Cruises Inc., owner and operator of the Celebrity Equinox.
A representative for Celebrity Cruises said in an email Friday: «Due to the sensitivity of the facts alleged and out of respect for the family, we decline to comment on the matter.»
After two days on the cruise, the vacation turned bleak when robert jones died of a heart attack, the lawsuit said.
After her husband’s death, according to the lawsuit, Marilyn Jones was told she had the option of preserving her husband’s body in the cruise ship’s morgue for the next six days until the ship docked in Fort Lauderdale. The lawsuit also alleges that Jones was discouraged from taking her husband’s body off the cruise ship in San Juan when she was warned that the coroner’s office might take possession of her body and perform an autopsy before turning it over to a funeral home.
The ship’s staff also warned her that if she stayed in Puerto Rico, she would be responsible for securing a return trip home for herself and her late husband, according to the lawsuit.
Warnings from staff about leaving the ship with her husband’s body in Puerto Rico left her little choice, the lawsuit alleges.
They told her there would be a “50/50 chance that a medical examiner in San Juan would ‘take possession’ of her husband’s body and perform an autopsy. This was especially distressing for Ms. Jones, who is elderly and traveling alone with her husband,” the lawsuit states.
When the Equinox docked in Florida nearly a week after her husband’s death, a funeral home worker and an officer from the local sheriff’s office arrived to handle the body, the lawsuit says.
But the body of Robert Jones was not in the ship’s morgue, but instead was transferred to a refrigerator on a different floor. The refrigerator, the suit said, was not cold enough to preserve the body, which was in a state of severe decomposition, the suit said.
In the cooler, Jones’ body was not on a bed or medical table, but «was lying in a bag on a pallet on the floor,» the lawsuit said.
The inadequate conditions in the refrigerator caused physical humiliation to Jones’ body, according to the lawsuit.
“By allowing Mr. Jones’s body to decompose while on the ship to such a state that his family was unable to have open casket wake and funeral services, denying his wife of 55 years, children, grandchildren, friends and community the closure of his family and community deserved it, a practice that was part of his family’s culture,» the lawsuit says.
The ship should have been equipped to handle one death, the lawsuit says, citing heart attacks and cardiac incidents as the «leading cause of death among passengers on its ships, having had at least 37 deaths aboard its own cruise ships since 2001.» ” according to the demand.
The lawsuit alleges that the cruise ship should have maintained a functioning mortuary, inspected to make sure it was working, or checked on Jones’ body with reasonable frequency to make sure it was properly preserved.
Jones’ family is seeking a jury trial and compensation of at least $1 million, according to the lawsuit.
Donna Mendell contributed.