The cruise crew allowed the body to decompose in the refrigerator

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Her dream vacation turned into a nightmare: Marilyn Jones from the US wanted to enjoy a trip on the cruise ship with her husband Robert († 78) last summer. But in the end nothing came of it. While traveling on the Celebrity Equinox, her husband suffered a heart attack and died instantly.

The widow’s cruise crew then offered to keep her husband in a suitable refrigerator until the next stop at the ship’s morgue. Six days later, as Jones was about to disembark in Florida, she was horrified to discover that the ship’s crew had shown little regard for her husband’s body. Instead of keeping him in the morgue, they would have simply stored his lifeless body in a refrigerator. That reports the New York Post.

Widow is suing company for $1 million

It wasn’t hard to see that the corpse hadn’t been kept in a designated refrigerator. Employees at a funeral home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, discovered the body in a blood-spattered bag on a pallet in the bottom of the cooler. She already had green spots and was bloated. According to the undertakers, it was “immediately apparent” that the body was in an “advanced stage of decomposition and had never been kept at a temperature suitable to prevent decomposition”.

Marilyn Jones and her family are now suing the cruise line for $1 million in damages. The indictment states that Mr Jones’ lifeless body was not found in the ship’s morgue. “Instead, his body was removed from the ship’s morgue at an unknown time and placed in a cooler on another floor.”

The refrigerator was not at the proper temperature to protect the body from decomposition, the indictment said. As a result, his relatives could not hold an open casket burial, “which was a long-standing family custom and what his family would have wanted”.

One thing is clear: if Mr. Jones’ family had known there was no functioning morgue on the ship, they would have had his body removed from the ship sooner. A request from the New York Post went unanswered to the cruise line. (dzc)

Source: Blick