Premature burial delays funeral for family’s matriarch

Once the funeral home staff was alerted about the mixup, the family was shown the bodies of three other deceased women in the preparation room.

The family were appalled when it later emerged that their mother had been laid to rest the day before by another family at Mount Hope Cemetery.

Family members of Ella Mae Rutledge, 74, had arrived at Leak and Sons Funeral Home in the Chatham neighborhood Friday afternoon to perform a last-minute inspection of her body before the viewing, said her daughter, Monique Williams.

A planned Chicago funeral didn’t take place Saturday because the person to be remembered had already been buried.

‘Me and my brother say, ‘Dang! “[We said], “That don’t look nothing like Mom, ‘” Williams tells CBS Chicago”. She looked at the woman’s nails. Leak and Son had it exhumed and is waiting for Williams to positively identify the body.

Rutledge’s nails were always kept short.

She said her suspicions were confirmed when she pulled back the wig to see black hair – her mother had grey hair. Her mother had gray hair. “I said, Oh, no'”. “They shipped her to a facility south and embalmed her”, Ruffin said. So none of the women were her mom?

“They 100 percent identified the person that they buried, on yesterday, as their mother”. “I flipped and said, ‘You better get someone in here, because this is not my mother, ‘” said Williams.

Mrs Rutledge’s family held a memorial service on Saturday after her body could not be found, and her daughter now fears she was buried by another family.

After a few investigating, Spencer Leak – owner of the funeral home – admitted that an employee mixed up the nametags of two bodies. “We plan to have the situation rectified in the coming days”.

“You all need have to have a few kind of fail-proof system”, Williams says.

“As far as I’m concerned, I buried my mother [Saturday] when I had her memorial”, Williams said.