Boynton Beach Funeral Home Negligence Lawyer
South county matters are filed in Delray Beach rather than downtown West Palm Beach, and our Boynton office is the closer one for families in Delray, Boca Raton and Lake Worth. We take these claims for families across Palm Beach County: wrongful cremation, remains lost or released to the wrong people, failed embalming, burial in the wrong plot. Our office is at 1375 E Gateway Blvd, and a suit like this is filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, South County Courthouse in Delray Beach. Call 833-370-8692 and speak to a lawyer about what happened.
Do not give a recorded statement to the funeral home or its insurer before you speak to a lawyer. If you arranged this from out of state, save every email and text with the funeral home. When a family could not be there in person, that written record is often the only account of what they were told.
South county files in Delray, not downtown
Below is what a Boynton Beach funeral home claim involves: the failures this part of Palm Beach County produces, what Florida requires you to prove, how that gets proved, and what it is worth. The statutes are on the statewide page. This is the local part.
Boynton Beach funeral home claims are filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, generally at the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach. The area’s dense retirement communities mean a high volume of preneed contracts sold years in advance, and contracts that are not honored are a recurring local failure. Florida allows these claims with no physical injury.
What to do this week
None of this requires a lawyer and all of it is easier now than in six months. Where a case exists, these are also the steps that decide how strong it is.
- Put every question in writing, starting today. Email or text rather than telephone, and ask the same questions you have already asked. Who authorized this. When. Where are the remains now. Who handled them. What paperwork exists. A funeral home that has made a mistake will answer a phone call vaguely and will answer an email carefully, and the careful answer is the one you can use later. If they will only talk, write down what they said afterward and send it back to them asking them to confirm it.
- Do not sign anything else. Not an amended contract, not a revised authorization, not a settlement of the bill, not a waiver offered with an apology and a refund. Refunds in these cases arrive attached to language that ends the claim, and they arrive fast, before a family has any idea what happened. A refund of the funeral bill is nothing next to what this kind of case is worth, and it cannot be undone once it is signed.
- Keep the paperwork you already have. The contract, the price list, the authorization forms, the death certificate, the cremation authorization if there was one, the receipts, the correspondence and anything from a cemetery or a crematory. Photograph all of it today. These files are usually thin and the originals are usually held by the funeral home, so what the family kept is frequently the only independent copy of anything.
How these cases arise in Boynton Beach
Families in Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Lake Worth share a county with West Palm Beach but not a courthouse. Civil matters from this end of the county go to the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach, and our Boynton office on East Gateway is the closer one to it.
The community here is dense with condominium and retirement developments, many with residents whose families live out of state. That distance is the recurring problem in these cases: the relatives making decisions are on the phone from somewhere else, they cannot walk in and look, and they are taking the funeral home at its word about what has already been done.
South Palm Beach County is dense with retirement and 55-and-over communities, and that shapes these cases before anything goes wrong.
Preneed arrangements bought years earlier
A great deal of this area’s funeral work was agreed and paid for long before anybody died.
- A contract signed a decade ago that the family has never read
- Terms the family is told are different from what the deceased was sold
- An establishment that has changed hands since the contract was written
- A merchandise or service selection quietly substituted for something cheaper
Communities where the establishment is chosen for you
A recommendation from a community, a facility or a religious organization narrows the choice to one.
- A family with no independent view of the establishment they are using
- Arrangements agreed under time pressure with somebody they have never met
- Whether anybody explained what was being authorized and in what order
- The same establishment serving the same community for decades, complaints included
A spouse making decisions alone
A surviving spouse in their eighties, arranging a funeral without the children present, is the common picture here.
- Authorization signed by somebody in no condition to be reading a contract
- Children out of state finding out afterward what was agreed
- What was explained, and what was simply put in front of somebody to sign
- A family divided by a decision only one of them knew about
Burial, and the cemeteries that serve the area
Interment is more common here than the county average, which brings its own set of failures.
- Burial in the wrong plot or the wrong section
- Plots bought in advance that turn out to be occupied or to have been resold
- Cemetery records that do not match the map the family was shown
- Disinterment to put it right, which is an ordeal the family goes through twice
What we ask Boynton Beach families to look at
- Arrangements made entirely by phone with a relative who never saw the facility
- A viewing scheduled and rescheduled around out-of-state family travel
- Remains shipped to another state without the family confirming what was sent
- A community or condominium association funeral benefit the family cannot get accounted for
What actually goes wrong
These are the failures that bring families to this firm. Where a death fell under the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner, the release paperwork usually shows who held custody at the moment one of them happened, and it is among the first records we request.
- Embalming that was contracted for and never performed, discovered at a viewing
- A body stored without refrigeration, or in a facility whose cooling had failed
- Visible deterioration at an open casket viewing the family was assured would be possible
- Organs, tissue or a prosthesis removed, retained or discarded without anybody asking
- A body shipped to the wrong destination, or held for weeks while paperwork nobody explained was chased
- Jewelry, clothing and personal effects that went in and did not come back
What a family is left with
The grief that had somewhere to go, and then did not
This is what these cases are actually about, and it is why Florida treats them differently from an ordinary claim. A funeral is the arrangement a family makes to hold a death in a shape they can carry. When it is mishandled, that arrangement is taken away and replaced with an image the family did not choose and cannot put down.
Families describe the same things afterward: not being able to stop picturing it, avoiding the cemetery, being unable to talk about the person without talking about what happened to the body instead. That is the injury, and it is recognized as one.
Nothing that can be put right
Most claims are about restoring something. These are not. Where a body has been cremated, there is no examination to be had and no correction to be made, and the family is left with a question that will not have an answer. That finality is part of what a court is asked to account for, and it is the reason a case involving a cremation is valued differently from one where a mistake was caught.
A funeral that has to be done twice
Where remains are recovered, or a burial is corrected, the family goes through it again: another day, another set of arrangements, another gathering of the same people, and this time with everybody knowing why. The costs of that are recoverable and they are the smallest part of it.
What Florida law requires you to prove
The claim exists without any physical injury
Florida is unusual here, and it is the single thing most families are told wrongly. The ordinary rule is that mental anguish is not recoverable without an accompanying physical injury. The mishandling of a dead body is a recognized exception to that rule, so a family with no physical injury at all still has a claim.
The statewide page sets out the authority for that, along with the standard of proof Florida applies, which is higher than most families are told and is worth understanding before anybody decides what to do.
Who was entitled to decide, and in what order
Florida decides by statute who may authorize a burial or a cremation, in a fixed order of priority, and a cremation cannot happen at all without that person’s written authorization. A very large share of these cases begins with somebody who was not on that list signing a form, or with nobody signing one. That order, and what it means for who may bring a claim, is set out in full on the statewide page.
The establishment, the licensee and the people who work there
Florida licenses funeral establishments, direct disposal establishments, cremation facilities, cemeteries and the individuals working in them, and a licensee is answerable for what happens under its license. The claim usually runs against more than one of them, and where a body passed between a funeral home, a crematory and a cemetery, the question of who held custody at the moment something went wrong is answered from the release paperwork rather than from anybody’s account.
The deadline
Most claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 have to be filed within two years, and an older one keeps the four years that applied when it happened. The practical deadline is much shorter, because the records that decide these cases sit with the establishment and the physical evidence is regularly destroyed as part of the very thing being complained about.
How we prove it in Palm Beach County
A Boynton case usually has a document in it that predates the death by years, and it is regularly the document that decides everything.
- The preneed contract and everything sold with it, including any trust or insurance funding it
- The current establishment’s records where the business has changed hands since
- The authorization forms, checked against who Florida says was entitled to sign
- What was explained at the arrangement conference, and who else was present
- Cemetery records, plot ownership and interment registers
- Every communication with the establishment in date order
- Medical examiner release documentation where District 15 held the body
- Treatment records for anybody in the family who sought help afterward
Find the preneed paperwork before anything else. It is usually in a drawer somewhere, it predates every version of events the establishment can now offer, and it says what was actually bought.
What the funeral home and its insurer will say
The response in these files follows a pattern, and it starts with sympathy and a refund. What follows is worth recognizing for what it is.
You waited too long to complain
Most families do wait, because they spent the first months being told they were mistaken and the months after that grieving. The filing deadline is what matters and it is longer than the establishment implies. What genuinely does run out is the evidence, which is a reason to ask now rather than a reason it is too late.
A full refund, and a form to sign
The first move in almost every one of these cases. The refund is real and the form beside it usually ends the claim, sometimes in a sentence nobody points out. A funeral bill is a few thousand dollars and these cases are not valued anywhere near there. Take the apology, keep the form, and let somebody read it before it is signed.
It was an administrative error and it has been corrected
Corrected how, by whom, and recorded where. An establishment that says a mistake has been fixed has created a document saying so, and that document is requested. Where the mistake was a cremation, nothing has been corrected, and describing it that way is itself worth noting.
What a claim can include
- What the funeral cost, and what putting it right costs. The original arrangements, and a second set where a service, a burial or a disinterment has to be done again.
- Treatment for what it did. Counseling, therapy and medical care for the family members affected, past and ongoing, where somebody has sought it.
- Income lost while dealing with it. Time away from work during the discovery, the correction and the treatment, which in these cases runs for months rather than days.
Why this office for a Boynton Beach case
A Boynton Beach funeral home claim is filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, generally at the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach, and the firm has an office on East Gateway Boulevard in Boynton Beach rather than a mailing address here. Where a contract was signed years ago by somebody who has since died, and the business has changed hands twice, reconstructing what was actually agreed is documentary work done locally.
Who you would be dealing with
A Boynton Beach funeral home case is handled by one of the four trial attorneys in this photograph. You will speak with the attorney who has your case, and you will have their direct line whenever you need them.
They have been trying Palm Beach County cases together since 1993, and a suit arising in Boynton Beach is filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, South County Courthouse in Delray Beach.
Meet the attorneys →Boynton Beach funeral home questions
Answered by Brett J. Yonon, who handles the firm's funeral home and wrongful death cases.
I live out of state and arranged everything by phone. Does that hurt my case?
No. It is the ordinary situation here, and the funeral home knows it. If anything, a family that could not physically check the work is exactly who the licensing rules and the duty of care are meant to protect. What matters is what the funeral home told you and what it actually did, which is why saving your emails and texts with them is important.
My father prepaid for his funeral years ago and they did not do what he paid for.
Find the original contract and everything that came with it. A preneed arrangement is a written agreement about specific services and merchandise, and what was delivered either matches it or it does not. Establishments change hands and staff change, and a family is frequently told the terms were different from what the paperwork says. The paperwork is the answer, and it predates everybody’s current account.
My mother signed everything herself and the rest of us were not consulted.
Florida sets an order of priority for who may authorize a burial or a cremation, and a surviving spouse normally sits at the top of it, so the signature itself is usually valid. That is a different question from whether what was signed was explained, whether it reflects what was agreed, and whether the establishment then did what the form said. Those are the questions worth asking, and the arrangement paperwork answers them.
Where would a Boynton Beach funeral home case actually be filed?
In the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, South County Courthouse in Delray Beach. Which courthouse matters more than people expect, because local practice, the judges and the jury pool all differ by circuit. We try these cases in Palm Beach County rather than referring them out.
What should I do before I call a Boynton Beach lawyer?
Keep asking the funeral home questions and get the answers in writing. Save every contract, authorization form and receipt. Do not give a recorded statement to their insurer first. Then call. If there is no case here we will say so, and the call still costs you nothing.
More in Boynton Beach
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View →Florida Funeral Home Negligence Lawyer
The Florida standard of proof, the regulator, and the warning signs.
View →Case Results
Verdicts and settlements, including a $3,500,000 funeral home jury verdict.
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Nobody at the funeral home will give you a straight answer
Tell a lawyer what happened. We are at 1375 E Gateway Blvd, Boynton Beach, FL 33426, and the conversation costs nothing even if we tell you there is no case to bring.