“She was given a very difficult choice,” Thomas Carey, a lawyer representing Ms. Jones, her two daughters and three grandchildren, who are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in an interview on Friday. “She logically selected the ship’s morgue,” he said, after she was assured it had a working facility.
“At some unknown point,” he said, “somebody discovered that the refrigeration was not working.”
When the funeral home worker and the sheriff’s deputy found that Mr. Jones’s body was not in the morgue but had been moved to a beverage cooler, the lawsuit said, it was “immediately clear” that it was in the advanced stages of decomposition, the lawsuit said. The body, it said, had expanded with gas and “his skin had turned green.”
The cooler was intended for things like soda, Mr. Carey said, and was not nearly cold enough to store a human body.
Like all cruise ships, the Celebrity Equinox, which is registered in Malta and can carry up to 2,852 people, is required to have a morgue because onboard deaths are not uncommon, said Hendrik Keijer, a marine operations expert who served for 10 years as a captain on Holland America Line cruise ships.
“For some people it is their last vacation, unfortunately” Mr. Keijer said. “That’s why morgues are onboard.”
Jacob Munch, a maritime lawyer who is also representing Ms. Jones in her lawsuit, said cruise lines have an obligation to maintain the morgues.
“It’s incumbent on them to make sure they’re working properly,” he said in an interview, “especially in sensitive situations like this. She’s turning to them for advice.”
Credit: Source link
