State Supreme Court overturns cemetery ruling
The Texas Supreme Court reversed a $3.8 mil-lion judgment and ordered a new trial in the lawsuit that a San Benito family brought against Mont Meta Memo-rial Park and its owners after their loved one was disinterred from a family plot and moved to another location without the family’s authorization.
The double sale of a plot, the burial of Marcos Guerra in the wrong space in 2001, and the subsequent removal of his body to another grave without the permission of his wife, Juanita, and their three daughters is at the core of the lawsuit that the Guerra family filed against Service Corporation Inter-national (SCI) and SCI Texas Funeral Services Inc. (SCI Texas), doing business as Mont Meta Memorial Park.
According to the court record, Guerra was buried at Mont Meta Memorial Park cemetery in a plot that had been sold to someone else. His family refused the cemetery’s request that it be allowed to move the body to another burial plot, but the cemetery did so anyway.
The Guerras filed the lawsuit, seeking actual and exemplary damages in the state 404th District Court in 2003, and following a jury trial in 2007, the court ren-dered a $6.3 million judg-ment in favor of the Guer-ras and against SCI and SCI Texas Funeral Services Inc.
SCI and SCI Texas ap-pealed and the Thirteenth Court of Appeals in 2009 affirmed the judgment in favor of the Guerras, but corrected the judgment award to $3.8 million be-cause the trial court failed to apply statutory caps for punitive damages.
SCI and SCI Texas ap-pealed the case to the Texas Supreme Court, which earlier this month reversed the Thirteenth Court of Appeals and instead ren-dered judgment that the three daughters are not entitled to compensation from SCI and SCI Texas and that Juanita Guerra is not entitled to recover damages from SCI, because Mont Meta Memorial Park per-sonnel are employed by SCI Texas, and not by SCI.
The Texas Supreme Court found there was enough evidence to support damages for mental anguish for Juanita Guerra, but not for the three daughters.
The Texas Supreme Court found that the wit-nesses generally acknowl-edged that the Guerras experienced strong emo-tional reactions that would be expected from the unau-thorized moving of a loved one’s body: “But none of the witnesses, including the daughters themselves, identified a specific ‘high degree of mental pain and distress’ experienced by particular family members, or a substantial disruption of any particular family member’s daily routine.”
The court also found that the trial court erred by admitting irrelevant evi-dence of other lawsuits, verdicts and judgments and that this had probably led to an improper judgment.
The Texas Supreme Court remanded Juanita Guerra’s claim against SCI Texas to the trial court for a new trial.
The Guerras have until early July to seek a possible rehearing before the Texas Supreme Court.
eperez-tre-vino@brownsvilleherald.com
