A jury in a class-action lawsuit took a damning stance against a mismanaged Bartlett cemetery Monday. They found Galilee Memorial Gardens to be 99 percent at fault for the cemetery’s mishandling of bodies and its inaccurate financial and burial records.
That Shelby County Chancery Court jury also determined that the involved funeral home directors were 1 percent at fault.
On Tuesday, the jury awarded a total of $9 million to the deceased people’s families, or about $7,500 per body represented in the lawsuit.
The three-week trial included expert witnesses on industry standards of care, and the case covered the period of 2011-2014.
In this lawsuit, about 1,200 plaintiffs faced off against more than a dozen Memphis-area funeral homes they say sent bodies to Galilee for years after registration expired for the cemetery. The lawsuit alleged that their loved ones’ remains would not have been mishandled if a licensed funeral director had supervised burials.
The cemetery’s problems became public in 2014 when owner Jemar Lambert was arrested on allegations that the business mishandled corpses (including stacking coffins in the same grave plot because of the scarcity of space in the cemetery), as well as having inaccurate financial and burial records and being unable to find some bodies.
Then news broke that Lambert illegally buried some bodies on adjacent land he didn’t own. In 2015 he entered an “Alford” plea for mishandling bodies and theft, including the burials on someone else’s land. He received 10 years’ probation. (An Alford plea is a type of guilty plea used when the defendant claims to be innocent but acknowledges that the evidence against him is too strong to go to trial.)
Galilee Memorial Gardens is currently in receivership with the Department of Commerce and Insurance through the Chancery Court of Davidson County. The special deputy receiver, Robert E. Moore Jr. of Receivership Management Inc., was not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.
