Joe Yates
Cops responding to a customer being stabbed in a funeral home by one of its workers have launched an investigation into the business after allegedly finding 10 corpses improperly stored.
Richardson Mortuary, in south Houston, Texas, had a visit from Tamara McGruder and her brother last week after growing suspicious about how their mom and uncle's corpses were being stored.
While inside the premises, the pair said they came across an un-air-conditioned room with at least 10 bodies inside, with some placed on tables while others were inside caskets and some just wrapped in plastic.
Enraged at how their loved ones were being kept, McGruder's brother took his phone out and started recording what he saw.
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"I opened up the casket, and she had gnats in her face," McGruder told ABC Eye Witness News.
"It's bodies in caskets, boxes, plastic bags. Its no A/C, its gnats. It smells like rotten blood."
The recording of the corpses inside their premises angered one funeral home worker who confronted the pair and asked them to leave, but when they refused he is alleged to have stabbed McGruger's brother in the stomach with a knife.
After posting the footage online, grieving relatives of loved ones who were being 'stored' at the Brookfield Drive establishment flocked to the home.
One protestor, Murita Brown, told the outlet that she had attended after seeing what she believed was her grandma Bonnie Ashley - who was supposed to have been cremated last month.
"I saw a lady in purple in the same suit as my grandmother so I said, 'Wait a minute, that look like my grand momma,'" she said.
"This was March the 21st and she was supposed to be cremated already and we been waiting on her ashes and nothing having been happening."
While speaking to KPRC2, Brown added: "She was a loving person. She fed everybody. She’ll give you the clothes off her back. And she was a fighter. She was in a wheelchair. She was paralyzed.
"To see her arm kind of like draped off that stretcher, it’s just, it’s heartbreaking. But at the end of the day, I know God has this thing at the end of it all."
A constable for Harris County, Smokie Phillips, shared with Eyewitness News that the owner of the funeral home had arranged for the corpses to be transferred to other funeral homes whether they could be placed in refrigerated rooms.
McGruger's brother was treated with a minor stab wound in hospital, police confirm, having driven there himself.
While the district attorney will not press charges against the alleged offender with the suspect claiming he acted in self-defense.
UNILAD has contacted Richardson Mortuary for comment.