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Grieving father given wrong remains

Posted at 12:14 PM, Nov 16, 2016
and last updated 2016-11-16 20:50:13-05
A grieving father gets one more heartache when he's given the wrong remains.
 
"That's not right. I mean it's bad enough losing somebody, but then when you go and expect a service to be done and saying 'here's your body, oh wait a minute, I'm sorry that's not right. It's not yours.' Well then what happened?" asked Brian Rightman.
 
Rightman lost his daughter a few days ago. He had her name tattooed to his arm, right alongside his late wife. He paid hundreds of dollars to have her cremated by La Paloma Funeral Services.
 
He had no idea anything was wrong until he got a call this week.
 
"'You picked up two urns?' I said 'yeah.' 'Well they're not yours. They belong to somebody else.' I says 'oh great,'" said Rightman.
 
Two of the small keepsake urns contained someone else's ashes. The large urn and the smaller keepsakes have names written on the bottom of them. If someone had double checked that before handing them off, this could've been avoided.
 
13 Action News was there at Rightman's home when a representative with La Paloma came by to pick up the ashes. The employee apologized several times. She said the small urns were next to the bigger one and someone just handed all three over, not realizing they were different people.
 
"I just think that this is really very odd: The way they're handling things. And if they do this a lot they should be shut down," said Rightman.
 
The woman who came to Rightman's home said this is unusual for La Paloma. Rightman says he hopes that's true, since it was hard enough for him to go through.