The cruise ship "Celebrity Equinox" run by the US-Norwegian shipping company Celebrity Cruises passes near Leer, northern Germany on June 20, 2009.
The grieving family of a deceased Florida man has sued Celebrity Cruises for $1 million, accusing the company is responsible for the rapid decay of their loved one's corpse because it was kept in a cooler rather than the ship's mortuary.
An Unsettling, Unpleasant Discovery
In the complaint, as reported by The New York Post, Marilyn Jones' husband of 55 years, Robert Lewis Jones, died of a heart attack while traveling through the Caribbean on the Celebrity Equinox in August 2022. She was assured by cruise employees that his corpse would be kept secure in the ship's mortuary.
The ship landed in Fort Lauderdale six days later, and the distraught wife did not find the body in the ship's morgue. Marilyn discovered that her husband, aged 78, had been held in a walk-in cooler, the kind normally used to store cold drinks.
Apparently, the husband's corpse was moved from the ship's morgue to a cooler on a separate floor. The funeral staff discovered Robert Lewis' remains in a cooler with beverages outside and at a temperature too low to prevent decomposition.
The corpse was found inside a bloodstained bag on a pallet on the cooler's floor. As a result, it was "immediately clear" that the corpse was in "advanced stages of decomposition and was never stored in a temperature appropriate to stop decomposition from occurring."
Robert Lewis' green, bloated body prevented his loved ones from having an open-coffin burial, which was a family custom to them.
What Could Have Happened
After her husband died on the trip, the staff reportedly gave the widow two choices. Both of which were detailed in a file made last week in federal court in Florida.
According to AP News, the lawsuit claims that the crew informed Marilyn the corpse could be removed when the ship stopped in Puerto Rico or stored in the ship's mortuary until the ship returned to Fort Lauderdale six days later.
Marilyn placed the corpse in the ship's mortuary since she would have had to pay for a transfer from Puerto Rico to Florida.
The family believes that an open-casket ceremony might have taken place in Puerto Rico if they had been notified by Celebrity Cruises that the morgue there was temporarily closed.
In the petition, Marilyn Jones, her two daughters, and her three grandkids stated their desire to go to trial before a jury.
Fatalities on Cruises
Because passenger fatalities are possible at any time on a cruise, most ships carry a morgue and body bags just in case.
At least 37 people have died on ships operated by Celebrity Cruises since 2001, the complaint claims.
That is just a fraction of the annual cruise ship fatality toll. According to 2020 research published in the International Journal of Travel Medicine and Global Health, 623 people died while vacationing on cruise ships between the years 2000 and 2019.
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