in Newswire Published on November 6, 2017

SCI Pennsylvania Funeral Services, Forest Hills Cemetery Hit with Fraud Class Action

Last Updated on May 8, 2018

Schaefer et al. v. SCI Pennsylvania Funeral Services, Inc. et al.

Filed: November 3, 2017 ◆§ 2:17-cv-04960-GAM

A proposed class action shines a spotlight on SCI Pennsylvania Funeral Services' and two others' allegedly fraudulent and negligent business practices.

Defendant(s)

SCI Pennsylvania Funeral Services, Inc. Service Corporation International, Inc. Forest Hills Cemetery

Law(s)

State(s)

Pennsylvania

Categories

Fraud

Three defendants are on the receiving end of a proposed class action that alleges they engaged in fraudulent business practices with relation to the sale of burial plots, rights of interment, and other funeral and death-related services at their cemeteries. The lawsuit against defendants SCI Pennsylvania Funeral Services, Inc., which operates 44 funeral home/cemetery businesses in Pennsylvania, Service Corporation International, Inc. (which does business as Shalom Memorial Park), and Forest Hills Cemetery claims the companies:

- Double sold burial plots, thereby depriving proposed class members of the ability to be interred in the specific plots they purchased prior to death;

- Fraudulently represented that family members could be buried next to or near one another when, in truth, they could not because certain burial plots were already sold years earlier; and

- Sold grave spaces that were only slightly larger than the burial containers meant to fit in those spaces, then negligently buried said containers in a way in which they overlapped adjacent spaces.

The 33-page lawsuit claims that as a result of the defendants’ conduct, proposed class members and their families have been forced to accept material, often last-minute changes to funeral arrangements and burials. The case says these changes include relocating already-buried family members’ remains, cramming family members into smaller graves than those originally purchased, and violating a decedent’s stated wishes by forcing individuals to agree not to bury other family members together.

The plaintiffs then allege the defendants fail to maintain grave sites at Shalom Memorial Park and Forest Hills Cemetery as promised, with gravestones being “routinely toppled, run over by landscaping equipment and otherwise damaged, cracked or concealed by mud and dirt.”

“Despite encountering these problems at cemeteries they own and operate, and despite previously settling hundreds of millions of dollars in claims premised on similar underlying issues, [the defendants] have failed to take the actions and precautions necessary to prevent or correct the serious problems that are the subject of this complaint,” the case reads.

The burden of fixing the above-described issues are laid at the feet of a contract holder’s survivors, the lawsuit says, adding the problems typically pop up “on or shortly before the day” on which a decedent is to be buried and are not brought to the family’s attention until the last moment.

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