The Oregonian | By Shane Dixon Kavanaugh | August 22, 2017
A Portland woman is suing one of the state’s largest cremation companies after she says it mistakenly gave her the remains of a total stranger instead of her deceased father.
Kimberly Grecco, 53, made the ghastly discovery as she prepared to scatter her dad’s ashes off the Oregon coast on Father’s Day last year, according to her lawsuit filed Tuesday in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
That’s when she opened the box from Crown Memorial Center. The label on the box claimed to contain her father, Ronald M. Roark. But she found a toe tag indicating the remains belonged to a different man.
“People might think it’s just some ashes,” a choked-up Grecco told The Oregonian/OregonLive by phone. “But that’s my daddy. That’s my father.”
She is now seeking $2.5 million in damages from Cascade Funeral Directors Inc., which does business as Crown Memorial Center as well as Cascade Cremation Center, and its president, Randy Tjaden, the court documents show.
The company previously assumed responsibility for the blunder and was reprimanded by a state licensing board earlier this year, public records show.
But the lawsuit claims Cascade failed to follow adequate procedures and violated Oregon law in the way it handled Roark’s remains. It further alleges Grecco, who lives in Northeast Portland, suffered severe emotional harm that required mental health treatment.
“This has all put quite a dent in my life,” she said. “It’s still kind of surreal to me.”
Cascade Funeral Directors didn’t return a phone call requesting comment.
Grecco said her ordeal began back in November 2015 when Roark, then 75, became gravely ill and was hospitalized. For the next two months, she stayed at her father’s side as his condition worsened and he was placed in hospice care.
She was with Roark as he took his last breath in January 2016.
“I held him until they told me he was gone,” Grecco said.
Grecco hired Crown Memorial Center to handle her father’s cremation and later received what she thought were his remains in a cardboard urn. Stricken with grief, she said she kept the urn on her bedside table for several months but never looked inside.
“I just didn’t know how to process his passing, so I never opened the box,” she said.
Eventually, Grecco was ready for closure. In June, she and her husband booked a motel for the weekend in Lincoln City, she said. There she planned to scatter Roark’s ashes in the ocean on Father’s Day.
It was only then did she learn that Roark’s remains had been mixed-up with those of another man.
Later, Grecco found out that some of her father’s ashes had already been scattered by the man’s family, who was unaware of the mistake, she said. The rest had been buried in a vault at a cemetery.
The funeral home eventually exhumed those remains and returned them to Grecco, according to court documents. She was devastated.
“They just kept telling me it was a big mistake,” Grecco said.
But it was a mistake that the daughter can’t come to terms with. She said she spent the next eight months seeing a therapist, until the cost of care became prohibitive, and still remains distraught.
“It’s hard to imagine a more egregious case,” said Grecco’s lawyer, Michael Fuller. “There needs to be greater supervision and training in this field. This is a level of a mistake should never be made.”
Grecco said she feared for other families who have lost loved ones.
“How many times has this happened?” she said. “You just can’t do this to people.”
