When relatives of 84-year-old Jose Daniel Diaz Felipe gathered at R.G. Ortiz Funeral Home in Washington Heights for his wake in May, they opened the casket expecting to see the bald, 5-foot-3 man they had come to mourn. Instead, they found a taller stranger with a full head of hair lying inside, according to the funeral home's account of events.
Staff at the funeral home allegedly spent hours trying to convince the grieving family that the man in the casket was in fact their father, as reported by Patch. Eventually, staff changed course, telling the family that a mix-up had occurred with another decedent who shared a similar name, and that Felipe had already been cremated. The funeral home said his ashes were being held at its Bronx headquarters, but the family told Patch they remain uncertain whether the remains handed over are actually his.
The Manhattan funeral home now faces legal action after allegedly cremating the wrong person, according to a report from FOX 5 New York, which detailed the funeral home's attempt to convince the grieving family that a stranger in the casket was their deceased father. FOX 5 New York's report, published Wednesday, also notes that the funeral home is subject to a series of complaints involving deceptive practices and mishandled remains.
A Company With a Troubled Track Record
This is not the first time R.G. Ortiz Funeral Homes has faced serious allegations over how it handles the deceased. In August 2024, the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection secured a $704,000 settlement with the operator, including $604,000 in consumer restitution, after charging it with 82 violations for misplacing remains, concealing prices, and presenting decomposing bodies, according to the agency's announcement. The city's enforcement action followed dozens of complaints from predominantly Spanish-speaking families across Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The company was hit with additional lawsuits in Queens County Supreme Court in March 2025 after its Rivera Funeral Home branch mistakenly shipped the body of a 96-year-old woman to Guatemala for burial while sending a 39-year-old man's body elsewhere, an error revealed during a live-streamed service, per Law & Crime. The woman's family only discovered her remains were in Guatemala after seeing a reporter's video on TikTok.
What State Law Requires
New York regulations are explicit about the standard of care funeral homes are supposed to uphold. Under New York Codes, Rules and Regulations Title 10 § 77.7, a licensed and registered funeral director or registered resident must be present and personally supervise the removal, funeral arrangements, and delivery to crematory personnel for every deceased human body. Unlicensed personnel are barred from handling disposition or funeral arrangements under that standard.
Separately, New York Public Health Law § 4202 and state cemetery regulations bar crematories from cremating human remains without a signed written cremation authorization form from the designated next-of-kin, plus an official disposition permit from the local registrar. Whether those safeguards were followed in Felipe's case, and whether state regulators such as the NYS Department of Health Bureau of Funeral Directing will move to revoke the company's operating license following repeated mix-ups, remains an open question. It is also unclear whether the ashes given to the family can be conclusively verified as Felipe's remains.
Part of a Wider Pattern
The Manhattan case echoes a similar situation Hoodline covered earlier this year, in which a Chula Vista widow found a stranger in a coffin, only to later learn her relative had been cremated in Texas due to misidentified tags. In June, a lawsuit was filed against Tidd Family Funeral Home in Hilliard, Ohio, after an 83-year-old woman was accidentally cremated despite detailed written arrangements to be buried alongside her late husband of 60 years, according to The Independent. That complaint alleges gross negligence, breach of contract, and severe emotional distress.
Industry data from the National Funeral Directors Association, cited by Moneywise, shows the U.S. cremation rate reached 60.5% in 2023 and is projected to rise to 81.4% by 2045. As cremation volume climbs across the death-care industry, chain-of-custody oversight becomes increasingly critical, and families are paying steep sums for the privilege: the national median cost of a funeral with viewing and burial was $8,300 in 2023, while a funeral with viewing and cremation carried a median cost of $6,280, per the same figures.
For the family of Jose Daniel Diaz Felipe, those numbers offer little comfort. What they are left with, according to Patch's reporting, is an urn they cannot be certain contains their father, and a funeral home whose history of complaints stretches back years before their own ordeal began.
