Fred Love. (Photos provided by the Love family through their attorney Brandon D. Cameron to Law&Crime)
The ghastly condition of Fred Love’s body at his open-casket funeral was the first sign that something had gone terribly wrong. The next big indicator, much to one Missouri family’s horror, was when a “chemical smell” allegedly began emanating from a box that a funeral home gave them after his cremation.
In a lawsuit reviewed by Law&Crime filed in the Circuit Court for St. Louis County, Glenda Love, the wife of the recently deceased U.S. Army major Fred Love, has accused Baue Funeral Home in St. Charles and Simpson Funeral Home in Webb City — as well as a nonprofit organ transplant company, Mid-Atlantic Transport Services — of fraud, interference with her husband’s final wishes and remains and negligence. Glenda Love is joined in the lawsuit by the children and stepchildren she shared with her late husband.
According to the 28-page complaint, Love says the trouble started shortly after her husband died last September.
It was Fred Love’s final wish that his organs be donated after his burial with military honors. After that, his cremated remains were to go home with his family. But before his funeral unfolded on Oct. 3 in Webb City, Missouri, it was also agreed that Love’s service would be livestreamed so family and friends who couldn’t attend could pay their final respects from afar.
That livestream, Glenda Love alleges, never happened and for family and friends who did attend in person, they walked into Fred Love’s open-casket service only to be “horrified and emotionally traumatized,” the family’s complaint states.
Fred Love’s “skin was a bruised purple color,” attorneys for the Love family wrote, blaming the “poor embalming practices resulting from either rushed or inadequately prepared embalming liquid” that caused the mottled appearance.
“Further, certain rods used during tissue donation, which are to be removed after the donation and before presentation of a body during a funerary service, were negligently and recklessly left in the body of the decedent and presented to the family,” the complaint states.
Those rods caused the late Army major’s arms to be “unnaturally positioned” in his casket and even the American flag, “which represents the nation that Fred had spent his life serving in the military, was left wrinkled and unpressed on his casket,” the complaint notes.
When Fred Love was finally cremated following the traumatic service, the family says they were given a “plastic sack containing a cardboard box and articles of Fred’s clothing” and they were told that all of his remains were contained in an accompanying urn.
With the box, urn and sack stowed inside their car, the family then drove from the funeral home six hours to Glenda Love’s residence and during the trip, Fred Love’s stepdaughter said she “smelled an extremely pungent chemical smell and developed a severe headache.”
Once at the house, the box was brought inside and that’s when Fred Love’s son briefly inspected it, shook the package and smelled it to determine its contents. The lawsuit notes it was labeled with “biohazard” stickers. Unsure of the mystery smell, the box was left in Glenda Love’s garage for four days until the aroma started to overwhelm that space too.
The family feared the medical examiner or Mid-America Transplant had left some sort of lab work necessary for their father’s death certificate and were “too concerned to open the box,” the complaint alleges.
What ensued next was a dramatic and circuitous series of phone calls and in-person visits among the family and the funeral homes, as well as the courier and coroner who handled Fred Love’s remains. Glenda Love contends she learned her husband’s body had a “partial autopsy” conducted on it without her knowledge and that her husband’s head was embalmed separately from the rest of his body.
She alleges that it was a Baue Funeral Home employee who told her family that “essentially you were given a box that contains Fred’s brain by mistake,” the complaint notes.
Compounding their horror, Glenda Love says the employee then told them they could cremate the brain but there was no guarantee it would be fully incinerated. The Loves also say they were deceived about the dangers of inhaling embalming liquid when they raised that concern to an employee.
When a funeral home employee was asked by the Love family why the brain had been placed in a cardboard box to begin with — the lawsuit notes it was a flag box typically used for funerary flags that are shipped to the funeral home —Glenda Love alleges she was told that “for lack of a better explanation, it was a box that we had available.”
Love’s family says Baue Funeral Home and Simpson Funeral Home have blamed each other.
But Glenda Love says her husband was taken by the organ transplant service for harvesting a day after his death and that the transplant service told her that her husband’s body would go first to a county medical examiner before organ harvesting. Baue Funeral Home, she claims, told her specifically that they had a contract for free embalming and transport to the funeral home of their choice. She took advantage of the deal, signed the paperwork and Baue took Fred Love’s body.
According to the Love family, that Baue employee took the remains, put them in a box, labeled it “Fred Love Jr. to stay with deceased, do not open” and slapped the biohazard stickers on. Glenda Love says that the box was then sent to the Simpson Funeral Home for the funeral service.
“Because Glenda requested that Fred’s remains be cremated, the delivery of Fred’s brain to the widow in a cardboard box is so far outside the realm of reasonable care that negligence may be presumed by one or all of the defendants in this case,” the petition reads.
The lawsuit names the Jasper County Coroner, three Baue Funeral Home employees, a former employee from the Simpson Funeral Home and a former employee at Mid-Atlantic Transplant Services.
Baue Funeral Home did not immediately return requests for comment to Law&Crime on Friday. A spokeswoman for Simpson Funeral Home declined to comment when reached by phone Friday. According to the Joplin Globe, the CEO for Midwest Transplant Services Kevin Lee issued a statement calling the debacle “heartbreaking” but denied any culpability.
“Mid-America Transplant has standard protocols that it consistently follows in coordinating the donation process while honoring the lives of the heroic individuals who say yes to organ and tissue donation. While Mid-America Transplant denies responsibility for the situation alleged, we hope this is resolved quickly so the family can heal,” Lee said.
The Love family is seeking damages of at least $25,000 and claims in their petition that Baue Funeral Home admitted to making the egregious error during a meeting following Fred Love’s death. According to the complaint, Glenda Love says the Baue Funeral Home director conceded then that there had been a “breakdown” in communication between the parties but the director would not take “100% responsibility” for what occurred.
An attorney for the Love family provided comment to Law&Crime by email on Friday:
“Fred’s passing was devastating for the whole family. Fred was a loving husband, father, grandfather, and a multi-decade veteran of the U.S. Army. The acts giving rise to this lawsuit made the experience of his passing all the more difficult. Over a year after the events, we are still wondering how something so shocking could happen. Collectively, we have never heard of this occurring to another family, and thus we are uniquely alone in seeking answers. We hope this lawsuit helps us in obtaining some accountability, and we hope it contributes to preventing something like this from ever happening again to any family.”
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