Funeral canceled after family identifies the wrong body

CHICAGO, Nov. 9 (UPI) — A Chicago woman’s funeral was canceled after it was found that the wrong body was in the casket.

Seventy-four-year-old Ella Mae Rutledge was set to be buried in Chicago on Saturday, Nov. 7 after having passed away while suffering from Alzheimer’s a week earlier. However, when her daughter, Monique Williams, went to inspect the casket at Leak and Sons Funeral Home, the body she found was not her mother’s.

“We said, ‘This doesn’t look nothing like mama,’” she told the Chicago Tribune “We knew she would look different but we said, ‘Man, she can’t look that different.’ She had none of my mother’s characteristics.”

Williams’ suspicions were proven correct when the wig on the body was removed, revealing dark hair while her mother’s hair was white.

After confirming that the body in the casket was not Rutledge, the owner of the funeral home, Spencer Leak Sr., discovered that an employee had mistakenly switched the tags on Rutledge’s body and another.

CBS Chicago reports that Leak had Williams identify three other bodies being prepared for burial, but none of them were her mother.

It was soon discovered that Rutledge’s body had been misidentified and prematurely buried by another family a day earlier.

Despite the tragic mishap, Rutledge’s friends and family still gathered for a memorial service at Greater Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church, but Williams was still deeply unsettled by the treatment of her mother.

“We’re not having another funeral or homecoming ceremony,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “This was too much. My father is totally distraught. He and my mother bought a prepaid policy a long time ago, but after this, he told me, ‘No way in hell let my body go there when I die.’”

Leak said that the incident was jarring for him as well as no such thing had happened at his funeral home before.

“Eighty-three years in business, and this is the first time dealing with someone erroneously interred,” he said.