Lawyer: Funeral homes not liable for mishandled burials at West TN cemetery

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A lawyer says licensed funeral homes had no responsibility to know that the West Tennessee cemetery where they were sending cadavers to be interred was grossly mishandling burials even after it lost its registration.

Defense attorney John Branson delivered an opening statement Tuesday in the trial in a class-action lawsuit accusing more than a dozen Memphis-area funeral homes of knowingly sending bodies to Galilee Memorial Gardens for three years after its registration expired in December 2010.

Investigations have revealed that the cemetery misplaced hundreds of bodies and crushed caskets to fit them into single plots for years.

Families of the deceased claim the funeral homes should not have kept sending bodies to Galilee until the cemetery closed in 2014. The suit blames funeral directors for failing to know about Galilee’s problems.