The wife of Robert Lewis Jones, a 78-year-old passenger who died after suffering a heart attack aboard a Celebrity Equinox ship, has filed a $1 million lawsuit against Celebrity Cruises. According to the suit, Jones’ body was improperly stored in a cooler instead of the morgue on the ship and as a result, the body had started to badly decompose.
The incident happened in August 2022 when the ship was sailing through the Caribbean. At the time, the cruise staff allegedly promised Jones’ family that his body would be kept safe in the ship’s morgue, according to the lawsuit.
Who was Robert Lewis Jones?
Robert Lewis Jones was the husband of Marilyn Jones for 55 years. Marilyn, her two daughters, and three grandchildren are seeking a trial by jury.
After Robert has died suddenly, the bereaved widow was given the option by crew members to either have her husband’s body taken off the ship when the vessel was docked at their next stop in Puerto Rico or be placed in the ship’s morgue until the ship returned to Ft. Lauderdale six days later.
She decided to go with the latter and to have her husband’s body stored in the ship’s morgue. To accommodate for the untimely death of passengers, most cruise ships have a functional morgue on board. Vessels are also required to carry body bags.
A funeral home employee and a deputy from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office were brought on board after the ship arrived back in Ft. Lauderdale. When they arrived on the cruise they discovered that the body was not where the staff had initially promised it would be. To everyone’s shock, they found that Robert’s body was kept inside a walk-in cooler, which was used to keep beverages cold.
“When the funeral services employee in Ft. Lauderdale was brought onto the ship to retrieve Mr. Jones’ body, his body was not located in the ship’s morgue,” said the lawsuit, filed last week in Florida federal court. “Instead, Mr. Jones’ body had, at some time not yet known, had been moved from the ship’s morgue to a cooler on a different floor than the ship’s morgue. The cooler in which Mr. Jones’ body was found by the funeral employee had drinks placed outside of the cooler, and was not at a temperature which was sufficient nor proper for storing a dead body to prevent decomposition.”
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Robert’s corpse was found on a palette on the floor of the cooler inside a blood-splattered bag. The body was in “advanced stages of decomposition and was never stored in a temperature appropriate to stop decomposition from occurring.” It had become bloated and green. As a result, the deceased’s family could not have an open-coffin funeral.
According to the family, if the cruise’s morgue was out of range, they should have been informed. Marilyn would have then had a chance to get his body off the cruise in Puerto Rico.
“The reckless and careless actions and omissions of Celebrity directly and proximately caused Plaintiffs’ injuries, because if Plaintiffs knew that there was not a working morgue on the ship, they would have had Mr. Jones’ body taken off the ship,” the lawsuit claims. “If the defendant’s crew had either kept the morgue in proper working order or inspected Mr. Jones’ body in the morgue with reasonable frequency, his body would not have decomposed to the point that a funeral director was unable to salvage his remains such that he could receive the open casket funeral and wake services.”
Celebrity Cruises has not commented.
