A bungling New York City funeral home already under fire for losing bodies and exploiting families has shipped the remains of a 96-year-old Queens grandmother to the wrong country, where she rotted so badly, it looked as if her skin was “falling off,” a new lawsuit alleges.
“It was all about money,” said the late grandmother’s youngest son, Manuel Minchala. “Not even an animal can make a mistake like this.”
Carmen Maldonado’s grief-stricken children had enlisted RG Ortiz Funeral Home to help transport their elderly mother’s body to her native Ecuador just days after she died on May 18, according to the suit filed Wednesday in New York State Supreme Court in Queens— two days before her 96th birthday.
Instead, the woman’s casket was mistakenly sent to Guatemala — some 1,400 miles away — where she remained for two weeks while her body decomposed, the court papers charge.
“The hands of the body, the skin was falling off, so they had to wrap them in Saran wrap,” the family’s lawyer, Phil Rizzuto, told The Post on Thursday.
“I can’t imagine what the family is feeling like, or what the family went through seeing that.”
What’s more, her “sickened” kids allege that they also only found out about the blunder after one of their relatives spotted a video on TikTok — and forced the funeral home to fess up to its mistake, according to the suit.
“My cousin sent the video and I could not believe it,” said daughter Rosa Sincha, 63. “I was devastated. I couldn’t believe that this could be such a big confusion. I started to cry. It was incredibly upsetting.”
Another sibling, Carlos Minchala, 61, said that the TikTok video was “significantly traumatic to the entire family.”
“Why did the funeral home lie to us?” said younger brother Manuel, 51. “My mom was in Guatemala for 16 days.”
The alleged saga erupted after RG Ortiz employees took possession of Maldonado’s body on May 20 — two days after she died — to prepare for a small viewing and service at the Bronx funeral home.
Maldonado’s remains were then supposed to be sent to Parque del Paz — the town in Ecuador where she was born — for a second viewing and burial, the suit alleges.
But on May 26, Maldonado’s casket showed up in the wrong Latin American country, according to the complaint.
“Carmen Maldonado was not properly prepared for transport and was carelessly sent to the wrong country while in the care and custody of the defendant, RG Ortiz Funeral Home Inc.,” the complaint charged.
Still, the funeral home never informed the family of the mistake and they only learned of it after coming across a TikTok video from a local Guatemalan journalist who posted about the mix-up online, the family’s lawyer said.
The village where Maldonado’s body arrived first picked up on the problem, Manuel said.
“It was a man’s body they were expecting, and they got my mother,” he said.
Rizzuto alleges the funeral home initially tried to cover up its mistake when confronted by Maldonado’s children.
It eventually came clean, though, when the video was shown, the lawyer alleged.
“They kept saying that it was a, ‘small error,’” Carlos told The Post on Thursday.
“They made us feel as though swapping or having the wrong bodies is not a significant thing to them.”
Manuel immediately got on a plane to Guatemala, and said that the paperwork to get his mother back to Ecuador was “a lot of effort.”
When he arrived, his mother — who he said loved to cook and “shower us with love” — had already been decomposing in Guatemala for 10 days.
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“At first, they wanted to send her back to Miami — and then back to Ecuador,” he said. “I was crying, I couldn’t type a phone, I was shaking so much.”
By the time the elderly woman’s body could be retrieved on June 10, her remains were so badly decomposed, it looked as if her skin was melting off, according to Rizzuto.
“It was very difficult,” Manuel said. “The funeral home — it was all about money. They did not care that we were suffering.”
The kids were left “horrified, saddened, sickened, dismayed” by the error, the lawsuit alleges.
The Maldonado family is seeking unspecified damages.
The lawsuit comes just months after the funeral home chain was forced to cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars to customers for alleged predatory and deceptive practices after reaching an agreement with the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
In one alleged incident, RG Ortiz, which has eight different funeral homes across the five boroughs and primarily servesSpanish-speaking communities, presented a dead man’s body “sitting inside a plastic bag” for a viewing, the city’s consumer watchdog said.
Another time, a customer’s loved one smelled of decomposition.
The Post reached out to RG Ortiz Funeral Home about the latest lawsuit but didn’t hear back immediately.