Celebrity Cruise accused of letting Robert Jones’ body to decompose after heart attack: lawsuit

A Florida man’s heartbroken family claimed a cruise line left their loved one’s body improperly stored in a walk-in cooler, leading the body to decompose aboard the ship.

Marilyn Jones and her family filed a $1 million lawsuit against Celebrity Cruises after her 79-year-old husband, Robert Lewis Jones, died of a heart attack onboard the Celebrity Equinox while sailing through the Caribbean in Aug. 2022.

The filing, made through the US District Court in the Southern District of Florida, states Marilyn Jones, her two daughters, and three grandchildren are seeking a trial by jury, according to the AP.

Marilyn, who was traveling with just her husband, was allegedly given two options by crew members on the next steps of handling her husband’s body.

The body could be taken off when the ship was docked at their next stop in Puerto Rico, or have the body placed in the ship’s morgue until it returned to Ft. Lauderdale six days later, according to the suit.

The grieving widow decided to have the body stored in the ship’s morgue as she allegedly would have had to pay for transportation from Puerto Rico to Florida.

When the ship arrived back in Ft. Lauderdale, a funeral home employee and a deputy from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office were brought on board to retrieve the body only to discover it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

“When the funeral services employee in Ft. Lauderdale was brought onto the ship to retrieve Mr. Jones’ body, his body was not located in the ship’s morgue,” according to the lawsuit obtained by CNN.

The body, at some point not known by the lawsuit, was moved and discovered on a different floor of the ship inside a walk-in drink cooler in a bag on a palette because the morgue was out of service.

“The cooler in which Mr. Jones’ body was found by the funeral employee had drinks placed outside of the cooler, and was not at a temperature which was sufficient nor proper for storing a dead body to prevent decomposition,” the lawsuit claimed.

Warm conditions inside the cooler had led to “advanced stages of decomposition,” which forced the family to not have an open-coffin funeral, “a long-standing family custom and was what his family had desired,” the lawsuit read.

The family also claims, that if Celebrity had informed Jones of the out-of-service morgue, she could have chosen to get off in Puerto Rico with the body and potentially still have an open-coffin service.

“The reckless and careless actions and omissions of Celebrity directly and proximately caused Plaintiffs’ injuries, because if Plaintiff’s knew that there was not a working morgue on the ship, they would have had Mr. Jones’ body taken off the ship,” the lawsuit claims.

“If the defendant’s crew had either kept the morgue in proper working order, or inspected Mr. Jones’ body in the morgue with reasonable frequency, his body would not have decomposed to the point that a funeral director was unable to salvage his remains such that he could receive the open casket funeral and wake services.”

Most cruise ships have morgues onboard because passenger deaths can happen during a voyage, and vessels are required to carry body bags.

“Morgues are located on ships’ lowest decks, generally along what the crew refers to as “I-95″ — the long corridor that runs from one end of the vessel to the other,” according to the travel blog The Points Guy.

The Equinox made its maiden voyage in 2009 and travels year-round between the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and its homeport of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

With Post wires