Mon | Oct 20, 2025

Heartbroken

Family blames funeral home for failure to preserve body, but operator insists standard protocols were followed

Published:Sunday | April 13, 2025 | 12:10 AMCorey Robinson and Rochelle Clayton - Staff Reporters
Kamar Brown.
Kamar Brown.
Paul Patmore, managing director of Patmore’s Funeral Home in Trelawny.
Paul Patmore, managing director of Patmore’s Funeral Home in Trelawny.
Patmore’s Funeral Home in Trelawny.
Patmore’s Funeral Home in Trelawny.
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A funeral home in Trelawny is under fire from the grieving relatives of 32-year-old Kamar Brown, whose family says they are now forced to hold a closed-casket funeral due to the state of decomposition of his body – an outcome that has left his parents heartbroken.

Brown, a contractor from Highgate, St Mary, died on January 20 in a motor vehicle collision on the North Coast Highway while en route to work in Montego Bay, St James. He was the first road fatality in the parish for the year. After being pronounced dead at the Falmouth Public General Hospital, his body was transported to Patmore’s Funeral Home, also located in Trelawny.

The body remained at the funeral home for over two months until it was transported to Kingston on March 28 for a postmortem. It was at that point, the family says, that their worst fears were realised – Kamar’s face was unrecognisable.

“The guy is 32. He didn’t get a [visible] scratch when he met in that accident, and to know now that we have to bury him in a closed casket, that is not nice,” fumed Naveen Brown, Kamar’s older sister, sharing a picture of her brother’s body that she said she had obtained a day after his death. “The one (image) at the autopsy was too gruesome to share.”

According to Naveen, by the time the body arrived in Kingston, it showed signs of decomposition – sunken eyes, missing facial tissue, and severe deterioration to the crown of the head. The only means of identification, she said, was a tattoo on his hand.

The experience has taken a profound emotional toll on the family. Stone-faced, Naveen recounted that her father, stoic and heartbroken, travelled to Kingston in the hearse alongside the body, using cologne to mask the pungent odour. Meanwhile, her mother still refuses to believe that Kamar has died.

“That is one of the reasons why we are so upset now because she never looked at him when he died and now she won’t get to look at her son at the funeral,” said a tearful Naveen.

“It is better them did let us bury him the same way when he died. Him dead so young, and he is decomposed already and he is not even buried yet. He got a horrible death, and he is still dying in between his death,” she said.

WANTS IMPROVED OVERSIGHT

She is calling on the Government to strengthen oversight of funeral homes to ensure proper storage standards are followed and to protect other grieving families from similar distress.

Paul Patmore, operator of Patmore’s Funeral Home, told The Sunday Gleaner that his facility is not at fault as bodies are stored per government standards. He said he could not speak to Naveen’s allegations, explaining that he only knew that the face of her brother’s body was stripping.

“It is not unusual for you to see strips on a body that was stored for three months. Advanced state of decomposition would mean that it was completely decomposed and they (pathologists) wouldn’t do postmortem on it,” he charged. They would call for a blood test to identify the person, and that was not the case,” said Patmore.

He explained that even under cold storage, bodies continue to break down. Extremely low temperatures, he noted, can cause crystallisation, which doesn’t stop decomposition. He also pointed out that bodies sent for autopsy must be thawed for one to two days beforehand, as frozen bodies are difficult to examine.

“What we do is freeze and then thaw it maybe a day or two before. We have to thaw it out completely because the doctor wants no form of ice on it. So somebody might stand up over it and they will smell that scent, and they will tell you about it because they don’t understand; they are not undertakers,” he charged. “But it’s not like the body is spoiling. It is just because it is thawed. We have to thaw that body because if there is any ice, they will send it back.”

He said the odour typically subsides before burial.

To support his claims of proper handling, he gave The Sunday Gleaner a tour of his facility, including a reposing room where a body was present. The room had a distinct scent, but others were odour-free. The reception area was clean and displayed a variety of caskets.

Tennyson Cornwall, director of House of Tranquillity Funeral Home – where Brown’s autopsy was performed in Kingston – told The Sunday Gleaner that he could not comment directly on the case. He said that House of Tranquillity only offers the facilities for postmortems conducted by government pathologists.

Yesterday, Cornwall explained, however, that refrigeration only slows down, but does not stop deterioration of a corpse, and that two months is far too long for a body to be in storage.

He could not speak for rural areas like Trelawny, which does not have postmortem facilities, but said usually in Kingston, it takes roughly a month before a postmortem is conducted due to the high demand and shortage of pathologists.

He accepts, however, that the state of bodies in storage does rest heavily on the conditions of the storage facilities, and he also noted that it is “disaster” in instances where bodies are removed from storage repeatedly for postmortem, and then those examinations are delayed or cancelled. This, he added, could happen for many reasons, including when relatives do not turn up to witness the procedure.

“I’m not actively involved in that (postmortem). They (pathologists) only use our facilities,” he explained.

Cornwall said that while postmortems are conducted seven days a week, Jamaica’s high murder rate, coupled with the high rate of accidents, sometimes makes scheduling difficult. Nonetheless, he said major strides have been made to cut wait times.

“The backlog has been drastically reduced. Autopsies are done every day, including tomorrow (Sunday), we have about 10 autopsies. They have a doctor that comes in and he works almost every day. I can categorically say that it has been reduced drastically.”

CALL FOR STRICTER REGULATION

Distancing his business from fly-by-night operators, Patmore urged the Government to regulate the funeral industry more tightly as there are too many “suitcase undertakers operating in the country”.

“You have families complaining that bodies are decomposing because you have people who are going around taking up bodies and putting them at their yards in their fridges. We are trained to deal with bodies,” he noted.

Last week, Calvin Lyn, president of the National Association of Certified Embalmers and Funeral Directors, explained that certain deaths – including accidents, gun violence, drownings, and sudden deaths – are classified as police cases and often result in long delays before autopsies and burial clearances are granted. These cases can take up to three months or more.

Bodies found already decomposed usually take longer, he said, as these are not mixed with regular cases.

Without addressing the Brown case, Lyn told The Sunday Gleaner that he, too, has had such allegations levelled against his business during his decades of operation.

“I have had that similar situation, where the deceased body was taken to the place of autopsy twice, but it wasn’t done. So taking it in and out of storage and the autopsy is not done, and two months or more passes, the colour won’t be the same,” he noted.

corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com rochelle.clayton@gleanerjm.com