Terms of cremation settlement sealed with the court
MID-CITY — A Santa Monica funeral home has agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of money to the family of a man whose remains were incinerated, despite his strong opposition to cremation.
In March of 2002, Gates Kingsley & Gates Moeller- Murphy, a funeral home at 20th Street and Arizona Avenue, mistakenly cremated the body of Brian Sturrock, 46, who suffered from a rare form of lymphoma.
Greg Bolton, a spokesman for the company that owns the funeral home, declined to comment on the terms of the settlement. The workers responsible for the mistake were fired after the incident.
“All I can tell you is the matter’s been resolved,” he said. “We serve hundreds of thousands of families every year and this is an extremely rare situation.”
“All I can tell you is the matter’s been resolved.” — — GREG BOLTON Funeral home spokesman
Sturrock, who worked as a professional speaker and was an area resident, died in the hospital after his immune system was weakened by chemotherapy. His wife, Eleanor Sturrock, said nurses had to convince her to leave her husband’s body by telling her, as she grieved, that she would see him again once he was sent to the coroner.
But days later, she got a call from a mortuary worker who relayed the bad news that her husband had been cremated, which was apparently caused by a paper-work mix-up.
Eleanor Sturrock, a musician and mother of three young children, said she was shattered by the news. She said she had already arranged for her husband’s body to be preserved and flown to Lancaster, Penn., where an open-casket funeral was going to be held before he was buried in a family plot.
But what’s worse, she said, was that her husband was adamantly opposed to cremation. During his final days, he repeatedly asked that his body not be cremated after he died, Eleanor Sturrock said.
“I couldn’t keep a promise to my husband and there’s nothing I can do about it,” said the grieving wife after she filed suit against Gates Kingsley & Gates Moeller-Murphy last March. “He would have been outraged.”
Catherine Lerer, Eleanor Sturrock’s attorney, has said the funeral home failed to make an offer until the suit had been filed and that the offer was insufficient. But the two sides eventually worked out a mutually agreeable resolution, though the terms are sealed, according to court documents.
Eleanor Sturrock, who has since moved to the East Coast to live with family, could not be reached for comment on the settlement. After filing the lawsuit, she said she felt compelled to pursue the company — and not just for the money.
“I have to explain this to my children someday,” she said. “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 was-n’t able to just forget about it.’”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 10, 2004. Read the original PDF.