A couple whose late son was misidentified and then cremated by the coroner’s office in New Orleans before they ever got the chance to claim his body is fighting for more substantial damages after only being awarded $10,000 over their ordeal.
In a statement, an attorney for Theron and Sherry Pfantz – whose son, Benjamin, was at the center of the case – argued that the amount awarded to them was insufficient given that the judge presiding over their lawsuit found “reckless and outrageous misconduct” by the coroner’s office, which robbed the plaintiffs of the chance to properly bury a loved one.
“Even symbolically, $5,000 to each of them for what they have suffered and continued to suffer is inadequate,” said the statement from the Pfantzs’ lawyer, Richard Trahant, who added that his side intended to file an appeal and pursue an increase of the amount awarded by Kern Reese, a New Orleans state civil court judge.
In a January court filing, Trahant’s side had cited a number of similar cases in other parts of the US which had resulted in six or seven figures’ worth of damages.
A statement from the coroner’s office – which reportedly operates with an annual budget of about $4m – said the agency was “extremely disappointed with the court’s ruling and is considering all options at this time”.
Benjamin died of an overdose in September 2022. Though police were able to determine his identity, when providing it to the coroner’s office, they misspelled his last name “Peantz”. The coroner’s office later asserted that the agency found no records under the misspelled last name, and therefore an effort to notify the late man’s family failed before he was cremated on 31 October 2022.
Meanwhile, having become unsure of his whereabouts, Pfantz’s family spent eight months calling jails, shelters for the unhoused in and around New Orleans and the city’s coroner’s office trying to find him.
All of the entities told the Pfantz family that Benjamin was not there. However, by May 2023, the coroner’s office had realized they indeed did have Benjamin under the misspelled name. It was too late, though. All the agency could do at that point was inform the Pfantz family of their son’s cremation on the previous Halloween, a date their nondenominational Christian religion considers to be the most evil on the calendar.
“The parents were forced to come to terms with his cremation, unable to celebrate his life through a burial in accordance with their religious beliefs,” Reese wrote in the ruling he issued at the end of the case.
Benjamin’s parents ultimately sued the coroner’s office, alleging that the agency did not properly identify their son, did not notify them in a timely manner of his death nor adequately alert them that it possessed his remains.
After a judge trial in February, Reese determined that the coroner’s office “took no reasonable steps to correct the [spelling] error when Mrs Pfantz repeatedly called to inquire about her missing son”, according to a ruling dated 5 March.
“The coroner relied on the information provided by the [police] and took no further action when their … search [for family] produced zero results,” Reese’s ruling added. “The lack of any … search results constituted a red flag which should have mandated additional action, however, action was not taken.”
Reese said the failure by the coroner’s office to use Benjamin’s fingerprints, date of birth or state identification number – all of which the agency had – to detect the misspelling before his cremation was “reckless and outrageous misconduct”. The ruling suggested that “a mere Google search” could have rendered enough information to notify Pfantz’s family and spare them the unwanted cremation.
Contrary to the agency’s legally mandated duty to take “every reasonable effort to notify the next of kin”, the coroner’s office “took absolutely no action whatsoever”, Reese said.
Nonetheless, Reese ordered the coroner’s office to pay barely $5,000 in damages to each of the two plaintiffs.
The Pfantz family is one of four represented by Trahant to have launched litigation against the New Orleans coroner’s office centering on claims of the agency having failed to properly or timely notify decedents’ next of kin.
Trahant’s statement said the Pfantz family appreciated “the wording of judge Reese’s judgment” – but that they would go to an appellate court to request additional damages there.
