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Family Sues UES Funeral Parlor After Ashes Get Lost in the Mail

By Shaye Weaver | September 25, 2015 6:22pm | Updated on September 28, 2015 8:53am
 The McFadden family is searching for the ashes of their loved one, which they say got lost in the mail.
Family Filed Suit After Ashes Go Missing
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UPPER EAST SIDE — A Carroll Gardens family is in the unthinkable situation of searching for the ashes of a loved one that were lost in the mail.

After cremating Bertha Mueller, 92, in February, the Walter B. Cooke Funeral Home, located at 352 E. 87th St., sent her ashes to her family, the McFaddens, using the United States Postal Service since they could not pick up the remains themselves — but the ashes never arrived. 

Now, seven months later, the McFaddens have filed a negligence lawsuit with the Brooklyn State Supreme Court on Sept. 21 to solve the mystery of what happened to Mueller’s ashes.

“I’m looking for a chain of evidence,” said Daisy McFadden, 67, Mueller’s daughter. “I will go to the end of the world, whatever length, to find them. If it takes getting money out of them, that’s fine, but I want chain of evidence, I want to see where it went. I don’t care who is guilty and I don’t care what they’re punished with … but I want my mother’s ashes.”

In February, Daisy McFadden was recovering from back surgery and needed both her son and her daughter with her at all times, so picking up the ashes was nearly impossible, she said.

The family was told the ashes would be delivered in two-days time, or roughly Feb. 13, and they'd have to sign for the package, but the package never came and a signature was never given, they said.

Cremated remains may only be sent as Priority Mail Express with delivery confirmation by the USPS, according to funeralethics.org. FedEx and UPS will not accept them.

Attempts to gather evidence about where the ashes might have gone have been futile — the funeral home was evasive and told the McFaddens that they had to do their own investigation before they could answer her questions, she said.

“A few days turned into a week and a week turned into more weeks,” Daisy McFadden said. “If you tell me it was delivered on Feb. 13, and at the end of March you don’t have a signature back, doesn’t that raise a flag and tell you maybe to look into it?”

The supervisor from the post office got in touch with the family, saying the office takes photos of each parcel with a tracking number and that the McFaddens' package had the wrong address on it, according to Daisy McFadden.

Their mailman told them that the package was delivered but that one of the McFadden’s caretakers answered the door and told him to leave it on the stoop, Remy Mcfadden, Mueller’s 25-year-old granddaughter, added. He told them that it was likely stolen from the stoop, she said.

The USPS cannot be sued, according to the McFadden’s lawyer, James Greenberg, who did not immediately return a request for further comment.

In 2011, Daisy McFadden paid the funeral home, Walter B. Cooke, $3,696.75 for its cremation services once she realized her mother was sick with dementia.  She said she wanted to get all of her ducks in a row instead of “having to make decisions in panic mode.”

The funeral home is owned and operated by a subsidiary of Service Corporation International in Texas, called Dignity Memorial, which operates nearly 4,000 funeral homes and cemeteries in 12 countries.

The company has been in trouble before — last year it settled a lawsuit alleging that a cemetery it operates in California desecrated several graves in order to fit in more burials, and in 2003, it paid $14 million to the state of Florida and $100 million to hundreds of families that complained the company oversold plots to make room for burial sites, according to Bloomberg.com.

The funeral home referred DNAinfo to Service Corporation International, which declined to comment, saying it would be inappropriate to discuss details when there is litigation pending.

All of this frustration has caused psychological trauma, according to the lawsuit, and the McFaddens are still agonizing over it.

“[Mueller] stated she didn’t want to get buried,” Daisy McFadden said, explaining that it is not a common practice for Jewish people to be cremated. “She said, ‘You make me an urn. Make me something nice.’ She’d joke, ‘Put me on the window sill and face me to the window so I can see people walking by and so you can visit me and not have to schlep to the other side of the world.”

Mueller, originally from Romania, was a survivor of the holocaust and of the communist regime, Daisy McFadden said. Mueller “grew up back stage” in the Jewish theater that her family of actors owned in Bucharest.

She could speak five or six languages and was the most organized, neatest and cleanest person, Daisy McFadden added.

Mueller worked in the fur industry in Germany with her husband and when he passed away in the mid-1980s, she went to live with the McFaddens in Carroll Gardens.

“We were very, very close,” Daisy McFadden said of her mother. “I had left my parents’ house when I was 18 and I missed her terribly. I had the best 25 years of my life.”

Mueller, who was a published poet, went by "Dee Dee" — what her granddaughter gave her when she was younger.

“It’s bad enough she died but to lose what was left of her … she’s not even buried somewhere,” Remy McFadden said. “It’s like she’s completely floating in the mail space.”