Galilee Memorial Gardens trial begins
Lawsuit says bodies were mishandled at cemetery
A funeral industry expert told a Shelby County Chancery Court jury on Tuesday that a funeral director’s obligation is not complete until he sees that a casket is buried and flowers placed on the grave.
Charles Crawford, owner of Crawford Mortuary & Cremation in Nashville, was the first witness to testify in the class action lawsuit against Galilee Memorial Gardens and the dozens of local funeral homes that left bodies there, not knowing that those bodies were not being properly buried.
The funeral directors habitually left bodies at the cemetery to be buried, but did not wait to see if that happened.
“It is my belief that they were mishandling the bodies that were abandoned at the cemetery,” Crawford said. “That in of itself was a mishandling.”
Funeral directors are also charged by the state of Tennessee with completing an accurate death certificate, which includes the disposition of the body — either burial or cremation — and the location of that disposition, Crawford said.
“As the funeral director I’m going to attest to the accuracy completeness of that death certificate,” he said.
Plaintiff attorney Brian Winfrey asked how a funeral director would verify that the burial happened.
“I don’t believe they would be able to verify it. It would be pure speculation,” Crawford said.
However, under cross examination, Crawford agreed with defense attorney Steve King, representing N. J. Ford Funeral Home, that he did not know what the standard of care is in Shelby County.
And there is now law that requires cemeteries to bury bodies within a certain period of time.
In addition, Crawford said standard of care was something learned at an apprenticeship in the early 1980s and was
not part of his academic training at mortuary school.
On Tuesday morning, several hundred of the more than 1,200 plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit against Galilee and the dozens of funeral homes it worked with filled every seat in the gallery of a makeshift courtroom during the opening day of testimony.
The lawsuit charges that Galilee, on Ellis Road in Bartlett, mishandled bodies that were supposed to be buried there and that the funeral homes failed in their obligation to the families that hired them by not overseeing the burial of their loved ones.
To accommodate the extended number of plaintiffs, Shelby County Chancellor Jim Kyle’s temporary courtroom was built on the third floor of the Vasco A. Smith Jr. Shelby County Administration Building.
In the morning, plaintiff attorney Kathryn Barnett, explained to the jury in opening arguments that from beginning to end, it is the licensed funeral directors who are entrusted with the remains of a loved one.
It was that agreement between the funeral directors and the families that required them to stay at Galilee until the bodies were interred in the ground.
Instead, they regularly left early and did not complete the job they were hired to do, she said.
If the defendants had taken a few extra minutes and had done their homework, they wouldn’t have taken any of these families to Galilee and “we wouldn’t be here,” Barnett said.
There is no evidence that speaks to a conspiracy between the funeral homes or between any of the plaintiffs and Galilee, said defense attorney John Branson, who is representing M.J. Edwards Funeral Home.
Also, Branson said the state knew there were problems with Galilee, but allowed them to continue to operate between 2011 and 2014, the time period cited in the lawsuit.. The funeral directors had no reason to know and “no duty to know” what was happening at Galilee, he said.
It’s not a coincidence that 30-40 funeral directors from more than 20 funeral homes had the same understanding of their standard of care and left the remains in the care of the cemetery, said Andy Owens, one of the dozens of defense co-counsel. He represents Millington Funeral Home.
The funeral homes are not responsible for what Galilee did, or for what the state did in not shutting them down, he said.
“These funeral homes have 600 years of experience. They cannot all be wrong,” Owens said.
Galilee has been closed since its owner, Jemar Lambert, was arrested in 2014.
In 2015, Lambert faced criminal charges for mishandling bodies and encroaching on an adjacent property not owned by the cemetery. He pleaded guilty in March 2015, was given a suspended sentence and placed on probation for 10 years.
Witnesses said at Galilee,multiple bodies were buried in the same grave, crushing caskets to make room.
Cemetery records were so discombobulated that investigators were unable to determine who had been buried where. Accurate burial locations may never be known, they said.
Last year, a Tennessee Court of Appeals affirmed a ruling from Kyle that the funeral homes were responsible for assuring the proper disposal of a relative’s remains as part of the contract with the family in granting the class action.
Before the lunch break on Tuesday, Kyle chastised the plaintiffs for disturbances during the trial and promised to remove anyone who continued that behavior for the entirety of the trial.
Kyle also noticed the school-aged children in the audience and promised that there would be serious questions about why those children weren’t in school, giving those folks with children the opportunity to “reassess” their afternoon plans.
Court resumes at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.