Woman Sues Celebrity Cruises For Letting Husband’s Body Decompose In A Drinks Cooler For A Week After On-Board Death

A widow and her family have sued Celebrity Cruises for improperly storing her husband’s body after he died while they were on a ship last year. They claim his body was left to decompose, leading them to suffer from intense emotional trauma.

Marilyn Jones‘ husband, Robert Jones, died of a heart attack last summer while onboard the Celebrity Equinox. His body was stored for almost a week inside a cooler used for drinks instead of a morgue like she was promised. The mishandling led the body to turn bloated and green, preventing the family from having an open-coffin funeral. Marilyn Jones and her family are seeking $1 million in damages.

The lawsuit stated that after her husband’s death, Marilyn, then 78, was given two different options by the crew – to have his body taken off at the next stop in Puerto Rico or to store his body in the ship’s morgue until they returned to Fort Lauderdale in six days. If she chose Puerto Rico, the crew notified her that she would need to go with the body and transport it to Florida herself.

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Jones was alone with her husband on the trip, so she chose to have his body placed in the morgue. Cruise ships are legally obligated to have morgues because onboard deaths are common. But when the ship returned to Florida, a funeral home employee and Broward County officer discovered the morgue was out of action. They instead found Robert Jones’ body lying in a bag stored in a walk-in drinks cooler. The cooler’s temperature was much warmer than the freezing temperature required for morgues, leaving the body in “advanced stages of decomposition.”

The lawsuit accuses the cruise line of acting “recklessly, willfully and wantonly, and without care for the Jones family’s loved one.”