New Jersey woman sues funeral home for 30-year neglect of father’s ashes
A New Jersey woman is suing the funeral home that was supposed to handle her father’s remains after discovering his ashes had been sitting in the business’s basement for three decades.
Debbie Uraga, 69, and her family had unknowingly been visiting an empty gravesite at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Middletown for 31 years, believing her father, George Jonas, a military veteran, was buried there alongside her mother, sister, and brother.
“I’d go see him on Father’s Day and his birthday – and even the VFW, because he was a vet, they would put the flag on the grave. It’s like we all thought he was there,” Uraga told News 12.
Shocking discovery
In June, Uraga was contacted by a man from an organization that retrieves unclaimed veterans’ remains to give them proper burials. He informed her that he had found her father’s remains in a box in the basement of John F. Pfleger Funeral Home.
“It hurts a lot,” Uraga said. “I thought he was there and it’s just unbelievable. My father should be in the cemetery with the rest of his family.”
Uraga explained that in 1993, the funeral home assured her that her father had been laid to rest in the cemetery with her family. “They just said they agreed that they would bury him,” she said.
Legal action and accountability
The family has now filed a lawsuit against Mount Olivet Cemetery and the John F. Pfleger Funeral Home to hold them accountable and to prevent other families from experiencing similar heartbreak.
The owner of John F. Pfleger Funeral Home claims that Jonas’ cremation and services were handled with the utmost care and that they had tried contacting Uraga numerous times about the status of her father’s remains.
“All attempts by our funeral home to seek final disposition instructions from the Jonas family’s next of kin remained unanswered until we attempted to provide an honorable burial of this man’s cremated remains in our state’s veteran cemetery,” a funeral home representative said in a statement to WCBS.
Uraga disputes this claim, stating, “That’s false. Nobody ever contacted me.” She added that she lived about five minutes from the funeral home and wasn’t hard to track down.
Seeking closure
Uraga now has the box with her father’s remains and the cremation certificate bearing her name and address. She hopes that with her father’s remains back in her possession, he can finally be laid to rest properly.
“Finally, after 31 years, maybe he could rest,” Uraga told News 12.