Three sisters buried their mother in 2010, but they say she's not resting in peace after an Alabama funeral home allegedly lost her body.
Jimmie Lee Scott's daughters said the last time they saw their mother, who died at 77, her casket was positioned over an open grave in Montgomery's Oakwood Cemetery Annex on April 10, 2010, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday. When one of the daughters, Dakota Scott, visited again to place flowers on the plot, she claims her mother's tombstone was far from the spot where she remembered the burial taking place.
The lawsuit claims that Joe Kendrick, an official from Ross-Clayton Funeral Home, which had been hired to handle all funeral arrangements, tried to convince Scott that the tombstone was in the right place.
Yet Kendrick later told Scott that they would have to unearth her mother's casket, because another family was the rightful owner of the plot where her mother's headstone stood.
Scott watched workers dig up the grave, but according to the lawsuit, their shoveling revealed that there wasn't any casket or body underground. Several other graves were dug up, but her mother's casket and body still haven't been found.
"They undertook the sacred duty of handling Jimmie Lee Scott for the purpose of a proper burial in a place where her family could have peace knowing where she was," attorney Chip Nix told The Huffington Post. "When a loved one -- especially a mother -- dies, we want the best for that person. To think that a burial could occur and after which no one know where the gravesite is is horrific."
The lawsuit claims that the sisters have suffered "great mental pain and anguish and emotional distress," because of the funeral home's alleged bungling of their mother's burial.
"I can't talk with the daughters without them crying," Nix told HuffPost. "They're devastated."
The family is suing for $3 million in total damages from Ross-Clayton and Forest Hills Memorial Services, a company that Nix said was subcontracted by the funeral home to dig the grave.
According to Nix, the daughters paid an undisclosed lump sum to Ross-Clayton to handle all funeral arrangements, including the purchase of a cemetery plot for their mother.
Neither company returned calls from The Huffington Post.