…Researched and contributed by Gift BADEWO.
According to court documents, the widow of a pensioner is claiming that her husband’s dead body was found in a beer fridge on a Celebrity Cruises trip around the Caribbean, rather than in a morgue.
The incident was only discovered when a funeral home arrived to collect the body upon the ship’s arrival in Florida.
The man’s 78-year-old wife had expected that the body would be found in the morgue, but the specialists reportedly did not locate it there.
Instead, they allegedly found it on a pallet on the floor of a beer fridge with drinks still in it, and the body had reportedly turned green.
The lawsuit claims that the morgue was out of order at the time.
The details of the man’s death have not been made public.
A lawyer for the family stated that “Celebrity’s actions and inactions with regard to the body were extremely indifferent to his passing, his dignity, and his family, friends, and community’s loss, and showed an entire want of care for the safety of his remains.”
The lawyer further alleged that Celebrity Cruises had stored many dead bodies on its ships before and was required to have a working morgue on board, and thus should have known about the potential need for such facilities and the appropriate temperatures at which to store dead bodies to prevent decomposition.
The state of the body reportedly made an open-casket funeral impossible, as some parts of the body were allegedly unrecoverable by the experts.