A Florida woman and her family have filed a lawsuit against Celebrity Cruises. Marilyn Jones accused the company of improperly storing her deceased husband's body. Robert L. Jones died of cardiac arrest while on the Celebrity Equinox cruise ship in August 2022.
The lawsuit states that Jones' body was stored in a drink cooler on the ship instead of the morgue. This situation reportedly made his body "decompose while on the ship to such a state that his family was unable to have [an] open casket funeral."
His wife was informed of two options after her husband's death. The first was that she would disembark along with his body in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The second was that the ship would store his body in the ship's morgue for the following six days until the cruise reached Fort Lauderdale. The family decided to have the ship store the body.
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But when a funeral services employee in Fort Lauderdale boarded the ship to retrieve the body, it wasn't located in the morgue. The body was instead found in a drink cooler, which could not maintain a temperature sufficient to prevent a dead body from decomposing.
