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# Funeral home cremates the wrong body
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/funeral-home-cremates-the-wrong-body/
- Published: 2003-07-28T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T02:39:21.000Z
- Author: John Wood
- Tags: local, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*Lawsuit filed after funeral home cremates wrong body*

A Santa Monica funeral home is being sued for incinerating the remains of a man who was adamantly opposed to cremation.

Brian Sturrock, a 46-year-old professional speaker who suffered from a rare form of lymphoma, died in March 2002\. His immune system had been weakened by chemotherapy.

Nurses convinced his grieving wife, Eleanor, 39, to leave her husband’s body so that he could be taken to the coroner. They told her she would see him again before he was buried.

Eleanor Sturrock, a musician and mother of three youngsters, reluctantly left. She then contacted Gates Kingsley & Gates Moeller- Murphy, a local mortuary on the corner of Arizona Avenue and 20th Street. She arranged for her husband’s body to be preserved and flown to a cemetery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There, an open-casket funeral was scheduled to be held before Brian Sturrock was to be buried in a family plot next to his father.

The next day, Sturrock said a worker at the funeral home called and asked that she come to the funeral home immediately but refused to explain why.

She arrived at the funeral home and was told that a worker had apparently mixed up two bodies and her husband had been accidentally cremated, according to court documents. ‘Relay For Life’raises thousands for cancer fight Sturrock said she didn’t know what to do. “I just went nuts,” said Sturrock, adding that her husband had repeatedly stressed his feelings against cremation. “I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. So I walked out of the office and I lost it outside.

“That’s a really big mistake,” she added. “I couldn’t keep a promise to my husband and there’s nothing I can do about it. He would have been outraged.”

Officials from the funeral home owned up to the mistake and attempted to make amends.

“We made a mistake,” said Terry Hemeyer, managing director of Service Corporation International, which oversees more than 2,000 funeral homes world-wide, including the one in Santa Monica. “Those employees let us down and we terminated them.”

But Sturrock said the apology was not enough.

She and her mother-in-law, Janet, filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court in March, claiming the mortuary was guilty of negligence and inflicting emotional distress.

They are seeking an unspecified amount of money. Sturrock said last week that the lawsuit is also intended to ensure the same type of thing does not happen to others.

“I want some sort of closure,” she said. “But there’s no way of fixing the mistake they made. There’s some sort of emotional stuff that goes on with me. I don’t want them to just kind of say, ‘Oops.’

“I have to explain this to my children someday. And when they say, ‘Mommy, did you make it right?’ I want to be able to say, ‘Yes, I did’ — to be able to say, ‘I loved your dad so much that I wasn’t able to just forget about it.’”

Sturrock’s attorney, Catherine Lerer, said the funeral home failed to make an offer until the suit had been filed and that the offer was insufficient. Beyond that, Lerer refused to comment on the pending litigation.

In the meantime, Hemeyer said he is eager to make up for the mistake. He characterized this type of mix-up as very rare and said it had only occurred a few times before.

“We have over 20,000 employees, so it’s like anything else,” he said. “Somebody’s going to make a mistake, so our policy is to own up for it and do everything we can.

“And believe me, I wish it didn’t happen.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/072803-01_01-7.jpg)

(Photo: Carolyn Sackariason/Daily Press)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 28, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/072803.pdf?ref=smdp.com)