Celebrity Cruises is demanding a lawsuit filed by a grieving widow and her family be dismissed.
RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned the travel company is denying any liability in response to the shocking claims brought forth by Marilyn Jones, her two daughters, and three grandchildren, who are seeking $1 million in damages following the loss of their loved one.
In the original filing submitted in Florida, Jones cited how her husband, Robert, died of a heart attack on August 15, 2022, onboard the Celebrity Equinox.
Jones said she was informed that his body could be taken off at the next stop, Puerto Rico, or stored in the morgue until the ship got back to Fort Lauderdale in less than a week.
She chose the latter due to the other implications the former choice would have including arranging transportation and potentially having to wait for an autopsy to be completed.
Jones claimed that his body was stored for nearly a week inside a walk-in cooler normally used for beverages, leaving it bloated and green, and the family was unable to have an open-coffin funeral “which was a long-standing family custom” and what they desired.
“Instead, Mr. Jones’ body had, at some time not yet known, had been moved from the ship’s morgue to a cooler on a different floor than the ship’s morgue,” Jones alleged. “The cooler in which Mr. Jones’ body was found by the funeral employee had drinks placed outside of the cooler, and was not at a temperature which was sufficient nor proper for storing a dead body to prevent decomposition.”
The incident gave Roberts’ family “extreme trauma by visualizing Mr. Jones’s body horrifically decomposed, and knowing their husband and father was callously and casually left in a beverage cooler, stripping him of his dignity,” according to the filing.
The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial.
RadarOnline.com can confirm the travel company has since denied wrongdoing.
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“Plaintiffs’ emotional damages claims were neither the result of a physical injury to the passenger, nor the result of a passenger having been at actual risk of physical injury, nor were intentionally inflicted by Celebrity,” the filing denying liability stated.
RadarOnline.com has also learned the travel company asked the court to dismiss the plaintiffs’ action with prejudice to prevent Jones from filing again at a later time.
“Celebrity did not act with willful or wanton misconduct and, thus, Celebrity cannot be liable for tortuous interference with a dead body,” the filing continued in part, going on to respond to the family’s claims about the trauma they endured amid the ordeal. “Plaintiffs’ alleged mental distress damages are typical of natural grief resulting from the death of a loved one and are not the result of Celebrity’s actions or omissions.”
