Wrong Woman Buried At California Funeral

A mortuary in Inglewood, California buried the wrong woman this weekend.

According to NBC Los Angeles, the Simpson’s Mortuary was supposed to bury Darlene Davidson but somehow placed a different body in the casket. Evans Davidson, Darlene’s husband of 51 years, knew that the funeral home made a mistake, but officials said that Darlene just looked different because of the embalming process.

Davidson said: “I looked at her and said, ‘Well this don’t look like my wife at all.’ They kept telling me it was, but it’s just because she had been embalmed and she was sick.”

Despite Davidson’s protests, the funeral proceeded anyway, and the wrong woman was buried.

ABC reports that it wasn’t until a few days later, when Darlene Davidson was placed into a casket, that the mortuary noticed the mistake. Well, the funeral home didn’t notice anything. A woman at the second funeral was apparently “jumping up and down saying this is not her mother.” The funeral home finally listened, and Evans was called back in to identify his wife.

Evans said: “I didn’t know what to think … Why am I going to ID a body when my wife’s supposed to be buried already?”

Dr. Reginald Black, a spokesman for Simpson’s Mortuary, apologized to Davidson and offered to exhume the body and pay for a new funeral.

Black said: “We have standards and systems in place to insure as much as we can that these type of things don’t happen; however, we are human beings and we can make mistakes.”

Here’s a video report about the funeral mix up.

Black added: “Our main concern is for these people to receive the dignity and respect they deserve, and put the individual to rest. We are not sweeping it under the rug. We made an error and we want to rectify our error and do whatever we can do to make them feel better.”

Darlene Davidson will be re-buried this Wednesday.