When Eva Witherspoon lost her husband, Raymond, of over ten years, in March, she thought the worst part of the mourning process would be living without him. But her sadness soon turned into outrage when the Warford-Walker Mortuary, she relied on to give her husband a dignified funeral, botched up the embalming process.
When the coffin was rolled into the church and opened in front of all her family and friends, an undeniable stench of decay filled the room.
“The odor just hit me,” Witherspoon said crying. “I wanted to you know, get up and kiss him for the last time and went up there and bent over and I kissed him 2 or 3 times and the odor was awful, the odor was awful.”
The smell of Witherspoon’s decaying body was only half the problem, as the family was ready to bury Raymond at the cemetary, guests noticed the coffin leaking. Witherspoon’s son filmed the embalming fluid dripping out of the closed casket into the burial plot.
“When we go the cemetery, the family was sitting down and somebody hit me on the shoulder and said ‘his casket’s leaking.” said Whiterspoon.
Witherspoon has been looking for answers from the mortuary, since the death of her husband and hopes an attorney may finally be able to help. She hired attorney Dean Boyd to reach out to mortuary who has not responded to the Witherspoons nor to NBC, to date.
“The complaint here is that they were many thousands of dollars spent to ensure there would be dignity and compassion and respect for the dead and that just didn’t happen here,” said Boyd.
The Witherspoons will continue to pursue the mortuary to learn what went wrong during her husband’s funeral, however for now the widow is left wondering how someone she respected so much in life could receive no respect during his death.