Funeral home puts wrong body in casket, insists it is family’s grandma, Texas suit says

A family looked inside the casket at their grandmother’s funeral service and found it was not their grandmother, according to a Texas lawsuit.

The funeral home insisted it was the correct body, the family says.

Dolores Gutierrez Deleon died late last month in San Antonio at age 78, leaving behind a large family to mourn her death, according to her obituary.

The family decided to cremate the grandmother due to the difficulty of planning a burial service during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the lawsuit obtained by KSAT. They hired Castillo Mission Funeral Home to plan a rosary before the cremation to view Deleon’s body, but her children “determined immediately” that the body in the casket was not Deleon, the lawsuit says.

The funeral home did not immediately respond to a request from McClatchy News for comment Wednesday morning.

After funeral home employees told relatives it was in fact Deleon’s body, her family members found several physical differences, WOAI reported. For instance, the body was missing a scar from a hip replacement surgery that Deleon underwent, according to the lawsuit.

Now Deleon’s body is missing, according to the lawsuit.

The obituary of a different woman named Dolores Gutierrez is on the funeral home’s website. She was scheduled to be buried in a small service on the same day as Dolores Gutierre Deleon’s rosary service, according to the obituary.

“There could be a mix up of some sort, but it still does not excuse what happened today, like at all,” Deleon’s granddaugher Irene Blanco told KSAT. “I want to find my grandmother because with that woman, they buried her, so I don’t know if she was buried with the wrong family or she’s somewhere else.”

This story was originally published May 6, 2020 at 1:07 PM with the headline "Funeral home puts wrong body in casket, insists it is family’s grandma, Texas suit says."