Lawsuit Says NYC Funeral Home Violated Consumer Protection Laws Through Deceptive Business Practices
New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has filed a lawsuit against R.G. Ortiz Funeral Home Inc. over claims that the funeral home chain allegedly exploited grieving families by failing to provide the services they offered and providing inadequate and unprofessional care that elongated the grieving process.
The funeral home company operates eight locations in The Bronx and Manhattan and is particularly popular among Spanish-speaking communities. However, the DCWP says the company took advantage of these families and engaged in deceptive business practices that exploited customers seeking funeral and burial services after their loved ones passed.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said during a conference, “The alleged violations by R.G. Ortiz Funeral Homes is appalling and unacceptable,” adding, “No family in New York City should ever have to endure predatory treatment, especially during their time of grief and mourning.”
The lawsuit comes after 48 consumers filed complaints against R.G. Ortiz. Online, the company’s Yelp and Google pages also reflect droves of customers who detail their negative experiences with the funeral company. One user shared, “I will not recommend this place to no one. It was like the services were free and they were just doing the family a favor.” Another adds, “Horrible service, the lady of Latino descent kicked us out saying we couldn’t afford the service so we had to leave. In the difficult time we are going through of the loss of a family member she went out of her way to discriminate against us without any information of what we could afford or anything. Just by looking at us. I hope no one has to go through what we went through…”
Those complaints and others prompted an investigation by DCWP which ultimately argued the company's operations “systematically violate the laws and rules of the City of New York.”
The complaint details that the company’s business model misled customers and failed to provide customers with the services the funeral home offered, yet they still continued offering those services.
The complaint says that R.G. Ortiz regularly used “deceptive and opaque business practices intended to keep pricing information options obscured, in an effort to charge those consumers seemingly random amounts for its services, often resulting in price swings of thousands of dollars for the same service.”
Two of the most common complaints were that customers could only pay in cash and had to wait extended periods of time to receive their loved one’s body. The lawsuit explains, “R. G. Ortiz usually takes much longer to provide the cremains to waiting families, and ignores requests for status updates —often leaving customers waiting without any sense of what has happened to their loved one for several months.”
The lawsuit shares multiple instances in which customers waited several weeks and even months after the date they were promised they would receive their loved one’s ashes or death certificate. At times, death certificates and other documents would also have incorrect information like the wrong name and the wrong surviving family members.
Many other customers share their concerns about whether the ashes they received were actually their loved one’s. One customer, Sol Moreno, shares in the complaint that he was told his sister’s ashes would take seven to ten days to be returned to him. However, after a month had passed, he called to ask for a status update and was told it would be another week for her ashes to be ready because her remains had just been sent out. Despite this, Moreno shares that the very next day he was told his sister's ashes were ready to be picked up. The quick turnaround left him wondering if the ashes he received were in fact his sister’s.
Other claims against the funeral home include repeated failures to give customers information about their loved ones’ whereabouts when it was requested by a customer; failing to provide funeral services as offered because remains were given to family members in unacceptable conditions; failure to give customers itemized receipts; failure to display the actual retail price of caskets and general price list as required by NYC law; and failure to give customers information about the range of prices for services over the phone.
These claims and others amount to violations of eight counts of the New York City Code and the Rules of the City of New York, which collectively make up the state’s Consumer Protection Laws.
The lawsuit is seeking restitution for customers, civil penalties for violating the Consumer Protection Laws, and other damages deemed just by the court.
