Last August, Marilyn Jones and her husband, Robert, set out from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on an eight-day Caribbean cruise aboard the Celebrity Equinox.
The couple, of Bonifay, Fla., were just two days into the trip when Robert Jones, 79, died of a heart attack.
Celebrity Cruises presented Ms. Jones with two options, according to a federal lawsuit that she filed against the cruise line this week: disembark with her husband’s body in San Juan, P.R., or agree to have it stored in the ship’s morgue until it returned to Florida six days later.
She opted to remain with the ship. But when a funeral home worker and a Broward County sheriff’s deputy came aboard in Fort Lauderdale to retrieve Mr. Jones’s body, they discovered that it had been moved from the morgue to a cooler on a different floor, according to the lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Having been stored at an insufficient temperature, the body had “horrifically decomposed,” the lawsuit said, preventing his family from having an open casket at his wake and funeral.
For her trauma, Ms. Jones, who had been married to her husband for 55 years, and her family are seeking a jury trial and at least $1 million in damages.
In a statement, Celebrity Cruises declined to comment, citing “the sensitivity of the alleged facts and out of respect for the family.”
The lawsuit, which was reported by Miami New Times, said members of the ship’s crew told Ms. Jones that there was a “50/50 shot” if she got off the ship in San Juan that the coroner’s office there would take possession of her husband’s body for an autopsy before releasing it to a funeral home. She was told she would have to stay in Puerto Rico with his body and make arrangements on her own to get it, and herself, back to Florida.
Assured that the Equinox was equipped to safely transport her husband’s body back to Fort Lauderdale, Ms. Jones, who was 78 at the time and suddenly traveling alone, gave the crew permission to store his body in the ship’s morgue and agreed to remain on board for the rest of the cruise, the lawsuit says.
“She was given a very difficult choice,” Thomas Carey, a lawyer representing Ms. Jones, her two daughters and three grandchildren, who are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in an interview on Friday. “She logically selected the ship’s morgue,” he said, after she was assured it had a working facility.
“At some unknown point,” he said,…
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