The family of Alexander Pinon, 27, were left horrified after they were handed a bag of his clothing – but it was quickly apparent that it contained something else
A devastated father was compelled to retrieve his deceased son’s brain from a washing machine following a shocking blunder by funeral directors.
Following Alexander Pinon’s death on 19 May this year, his mourning family approached the Lima Family Erickson Memorial Chapel on Willow Street in San Jose, California, seeking a respectful burial for their loved one.
The family’s legal representative, Samer Habbas, informed local news station ABC7 that relatives had wished to alter Alexander’s attire prior to his final rest. The garments he had been dressed in at the time of his passing were subsequently returned to the family.
Yet in an appalling mix-up, the bag given to Alex’s father contained nothing resembling his 27-year-old son’s clothes. As he tipped the contents into his washing machine, the grieving parent was met with a ghastly scene as fragments of brain tissue tumbled into the drum.
Habbas revealed: “At that point, they had no idea that it was their son’s brain that was in the washing machine. They didn’t know if it was mixed up with somebody else’s brain or whether it was their son’s. They had not a single idea,” reports the Mirror.
Alex’s father was then compelled to undertake the gruesome duty of extracting the brain matter from the appliance. He returned it to the bag and went back to the funeral parlour, where he presented it to a staff member, identified as Anita Singh.
Habbas stated: “Ms Singh took the bag back from him, never disclosed whose brain it was, never gave any information, offered no apologies, and simply said, ‘I’ll take that from here.’”
The next day, Alex was laid to rest at Oak Hill Memorial Park in San Jose. It wasn’t until several weeks later that an anonymous funeral home employee came forward to disclose that the brain had indeed belonged to Alex.
The informant alleged that Ms Singh put the brain in a box and left it outside in the funeral home’s courtyard for over two months. They claimed that another employee eventually decided to inspect the contents of the bag and, upon opening it, was “overwhelmed by the smell of rotting human brain.”
“Don’t get me wrong, errors can happen,” Habbas said. “But what cannot happen, and what should not happen, is covering up those errors — and that’s what the funeral home has done here.”
He added that Alex’s parents have been deeply affected by the incident. “We don’t know the extent of how much suffering they’re going to go through for the remainder of their lives,” Habbas said. “But it’s something they will never forget — something they will have to live with forever.”
The Mirror has reached out to the Lima Family Erickson Memorial Chapel for comment but has yet to receive a response.
