Late minister embalmed in mistaken ID
Beliefs violated: lawsuit
A Brooklyn funeral home mistakenly retrieved the body of a Pentecostal minister from a hospital morgue — and then embalmed her, in violation of her religious beliefs, the woman’s grieving family says in a new lawsuit.
RG Ortiz Funeral Home in Sunset Park and Methodist Hospital compounded the horror by failing to immediately tell Mercilda Major’s relatives, the Brooklyn Supreme Court lawsuit says.
“This was like losing her two times over. It was just very hard,” said her son, David Major.
After Major, 85, died in November of pancreatic cancer, workers from Ortiz picked up her body, even though the family never hired them to do so.
Ortiz didn’t realize it picked up the wrong body until after the embalming was completed — even though Major’s body had a hospital wristband with her name on it, the family claims in court papers.
“Ortiz is obviously, clearly negligent, because the name was on the [hospital] bracelet,” said Edward Friedman, the family’s attorney.
Apparently having realized the blunder, the Ortiz funeral home returned Major’s corpse to Methodist, which is also named in the suit.
No one told Major’s family what happened until Heritage Memorial Chapel — which David and his brother, Charles, hired to handle their mother’s funeral — showed up at the hospital, discovered she had been embalmed and began asking questions.
When David and Charles pressed Methodist for answers, they threatened to sue the family for defamation, the Majors said in their legal filing.
“They kept denying the body was sent out,” Charles Major said. “We asked, do they embalm bodies in the hospital? They said no.”
Making matters even worse, the embalming was so poorly done that Major’s body was “unnecessarily mutilated,” the suit claims. Her sons were forced to cremate her remains, they said.
Mercilda Major was a kind but “no nonsense” mother of three who lived in Jamaica and London before coming to the United States in 1971.
Later, as a minister, she voyaged to Russia, China, Israel and Africa to preach.
Ortiz and Methodist didn't return messages.