Proof you should never trust a guy named Cletus

Jury awards $165K in funeral home fire

HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. -- A southern Kentucky jury ordered a funeral home to pay $165,000 to a family after an employee misrepresented the condition of a body after the facility caught on fire.

The jury in Christian County Circuit Court heard a day and a half of testimony before handing down the verdict on Thursday against Gamble Funeral Home in Hopkinsville.

The Kentucky New Era reported that funeral home employee Cletus Sivils didn't tell the family of Thelma J. Buckner that her body had been burned when the building caught fire seven years ago. The family had the body exhumed, discovered the fire damage and sued.  

Murdered millionaire's funeral finally set, 52 days after death

Fifty-two days after he was found slain in a New York hotel room, Ben Novack Jr. will finally be laid to rest in his family's mausoleum in Queens, N.Y.

Arrangements for his interment were finalized Monday, after weeks of complicated negotiations among family members, some of them as far afield as England. Services will be held 1 p.m. Wednesday.

In his will, the millionaire Fort Lauderdale convention planner asked that he and his wife, Narcy, be interred in the Novack-Spier mausoleum at Mount Lebanon Cemetery. Novack, the son of Ben Novack, founder of the legendary Fontainebleau resort in Miami Beach, has been at the Westchester County Medical Examiner's morgue since his July 12 murder.

A second lawsuit stemming from the funeral home's handling of the fire is pending in Christian County Circuit Court.

This is from a funeral home fire in SC, but it's the best I could do.

Alright, wow, where do I start with this one?

There’s the obvious joke I need to make, just to get it out of my system – what difference does it make if she was badly burnt, she was already dead anyway. 

Let’s start with looking at the issue as a whole. Problem number one: The guy’s name was Cletus Sivils. Never, ever trust a guy named Cletus. Sterotype much? Sure. But have you ever encountered a trustworthy Cletus? I didn’t think so. Next.

Problem number two: Do you know how hard it is to get permission to get a body exhumed? I want to know more about the evidence the family presented to the judge to get this permission. There is no way “we think Mom’s body got burnt beyond recognition while it was in the funeral home and we were lied to, so we want to exhume her body to find out.” Right. Well, maybe something like that will fly in Hopkinsville, but not in most places. Then again, if the judge heard they were dealing with a guy named Cletus, maybe that was enough.

Okay, so where did the figure of $165,000 come from? There’s no way the funeral cost that much. There’s really no pain and suffering involved, she was already dead. Sure the family doesn’t like the fact they were lied to, but is this really going to fix that? Damn litigious society in which we live these days. Seriously, maybe getting paid back for the cost of the funeral I can understand, but $165,000, really?

I found another story that threw out a couple other facts that make this even more disturbing. 

One: the fire was set by the funeral home’s owner’s daughter. Really? I mean, I’ve been pissed at my dad before, in fact, I pretty much lived in a perpetual state of pissed off at my dad most of my adult life, but I would never take it so far as to burn  down his home or place of business. That’s just low. Should we be surprised this guy hires non-trustworthy people named Cletus when he raises a screw-up of a kid who burns down his funeral home? (Sigh, only in Kentucky. Thanks for perpetuating that sterotype.)

Back to good-ol’ Cletus, who apparently realized there were three coffins that were burned, so he went to the family (I haven’t been able to find out if it was the family of all three affected or just this unlucky family) and changed the funeral arrangements to have a closed-casket funeral instead of the original plan for an open-casket. After all, we don’t want people to know what happened. 

First of all, I’ve been to an open-casket funeral and it was beyond creepy. (It was my father’s, the fact he looked like he was about to pop up and scream “Fooled ya, just wanted to see how many of you would show up,” made it even worse. And yes, he was just messed up enough to do something like that. I wouldn’t put it past him.) Anyway, I don’t ever want to go to another open-casket funeral. I can’t imagine anyone would want to have one in the first place. Death is not a beautiful thing. Closed casket – or shoot, even cremation – is the way to go. (And seriously, maybe this whole incident was God’s way of saying she should have been cremated? Ever think about that?)

Second of all, wouldn’t this raise a red-flag to any normal person? After all, think about it – you hear about a fire at the funeral home in which your mom’s body is at, and out of nowhere someone comes to you asking to change the funeral arrangements to a closed-casket. Wouldn’t that make you, at the very least, raise an eyebrow? Of course, if it were me and my family, we would have cremated her before this happened anyway, so it would be a non-issue (side note: Mom, if you didn’t know before, you now know, you are being cremated!). But really, come on, ask the questions BEFORE you have to exhume the body you idiots.

It does make you wonder if this guy was so freakin’ cheap that the closed-casket on display at the funeral was the one that was burned, or if he decided to at least give this poor woman a burial in an uncharred coffin. But you know, we are dealing with a guy named Cletus here. I’m not going to expect much of him.