During a Celebrity Cruises trip to the Caribbean last summer, an elderly passenger died of a heart condition. The cruise line gave his wife two options, remove his remains from the ship in nearby Puerto Rico and potentially wait for an autopsy or leave his body with the ship's morgue until they arrived back in the United States.. Fort Lauderdale Cruise Ship Port .The woman chose the ship morgue option to return to her family as soon as possible. She trusted that her husband's body would be safely transported back to Florida for funeral services..However, when the ship arrived in Fort Lauderdale six days later, the body was missing from the morgue..The family's lawsuit claimed that the corpse was found deteriorated and turning green on a pallet in a beverage cooler, as the morgue was out of order..According to the complaint, beverages were observed by the funeral staff outside the refrigerated container, which had been converted to a morgue..“Knowing their husband and father was callously and casually left in a beverage cooler, stripping him of his dignity in the sacred time just after his passing,” states the family's lawsuit..“The ideas and mental images will surely never leave the memory of the plaintiffs.”.A lawsuit has been filed in the federal court of Florida's Southern District on behalf of the man's wife, two daughters, and three grandchildren..Except for one granddaughter from Texas, the family members are residents of Florida and are represented by Munch and Munch law firm in Tampa..The lawsuit demands a minimum of $1 million in damages and claims that Celebrity Cruises did not respond to their request for comment..The lawsuit alleges that the cruise ship staff did not monitor the condition of the morgue..The lawsuit said that the wife would have arranged to take her husband's body off the ship in San Juan, Puerto Rico, had she known that the morgue was not functional..However, the staff allegedly advised her not to choose the Puerto Rico option because there was no guarantee on when the body would be released to Florida and there was a possibility that the San Juan coroner's office might perform an autopsy..“Celebrity's actions and inactions with regard to [the] body were extremely indifferent to his passing, his dignity, and his family, friends, and community's loss, and showed an entire want of care for the safety of his remains,” said the lawsuit..According to the lawsuit, human bodies can remain in a morgue for several weeks to months without decomposing if stored at near-freezing temperatures to slow the decomposition..However, the man's body was found in an “advanced state of decomposition,” indicating that it was not stored at the appropriate temperature in the cruise ship drink cooler..“The funeral home staff in Fort Lauderdale was unable to salvage his remains enough to be suitable for an open casket wake and funeral, which was a long-standing family custom and was what his family had desired,” said the lawsuit..“Having had to store many dead bodies on their ships, and even being required to have a working morgue on board its ship ... Celebrity certainly knew of the potential need for a working morgue on the ship, and the temperatures at which dead bodies need to be stored to stop the decomposition process from occurring.”
