One disadvantage of cremation is receiving and keeping the wrong ashes. It happened to a couple from Maryland, USA.

On 27 February, police called the parents of Coi’seir Parham, a two-month-old boy who died the previous August and was supposedly cremated in October at the Heaven Bound Crematory in Charles County. The parents were shocked when Maryland police told them the body of their child was found in the now closed crematory.

Authorities shut down the crematory last year for storing decomposing “human remains in cardboard boxes,” NBC News Washington reports.

The parents are suing the crematory owners for millions of dollars in damages not only for failing to cremate their son but also giving them ashes that were not his.

Meanwhile, an upstate New York family mixed the ashes of their mother and sister, whose body was supposedly cremated as it was found in an advanced state of decomposition in an empty Rochester lot in February 2024, New York Post (NYP) reports.

The sister, Shanice Crews, had been missing and the mother of two’s autopsy indicated a cocaine overdose as the cause of her death three years ago.

Last month, sibling Shanita Hopkins reported to WROC 8 that a stranger’s ashes had been mixed with her mother’s, after she got a text from an unknown individual from Detroit in November that Crews was alive.

Hopkins reported the text to Detroit authorities and the case is now under investigation. A DNA analysis of Crews and the ashes of the person authorities had identified as her resulted in a zero match, according to NYP.

The medical examiner’s office has since retrieved the ashes her family was given, NYP says, while Hopkins sought a legal remedy for the emotional stress caused by the “wrongful death” of her sister.