Family sues NY funeral home for $88M after wrong body buried

A family is suing a New York funeral home for burying the wrong body, despite the women’s children bringing attention to the fact that the body was not their mother’s. 

The 11 children of Sadie Williams, who died Aug. 17, are suing the Joseph A. Slinger-Hasgill Funeral Home in Amityville for $88 million for causing them “severe mental, psychological, traumatic injuries,” NBC News reported. The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Queens. 

Williams’s children retained the funeral home to hold a traditional Muslim service for their mother, which usually means the family has three days after the deceased’s death to bury them, according to NBC New York. 

The day before Williams’s funeral, her daughter Salimah Lee saw the body and alerted funeral home director Joseph Slinger that the body was not her mother’s, to which Slinger responded that it was, NBC News reported. Lee said that Slinger explained that the embalming fluid made Williams look different.

After the family held the funeral on Aug. 20, Williams’s body was left “abandoned” in the morgue of the funeral home, according to the lawsuit obtained by NBC. 

Slinger contacted the family the day after the funeral and told them about the mix-up, saying that the other body would be exhumed so that Williams could be buried. 

The family’s lawsuit claims that although the funeral home provided a second service for them, they “did not provide full funeral services for this second service,” according to NBC.