Deathmatch 3000

It shouldn’t have been this difficult to handle a dead man. James Mitchell Blair made preparations for his own death nearly 30 years ago. He had it all taken care of: the will, the funeral arrangements, the plot, the casket – all picked out and paid for years before he ever got sick.

“I used to make fun of him,” remembers Blair’s son, Vincent, “because he started making arrangements when he was in his 50s and healthy as could be. I told him, ‘Dad, you’re too young to be doing all of this.’ But he wanted to be sure to make his passing as smooth on all of us as he could.”

When Blair died of complications from a stroke last November at the age of 87, everything should have been ready to go. A phone call should have been all it took to let the healing process begin.

“I figured the whole thing would be as simple as following my father’s will,” says Vincent.

It wasn’t.

Just 24 hours after his father’s death, Vincent found himself in the unenviable position of haggling with a mortuary over his father’s remains. If his family didn’t pay nearly $800 in embalming fees on the spot, the mortuary said, they wouldn’t release his father’s body for burial. Delay, and the mortuary would charge an additional holding fee of $150 per day.

“I felt like my father was being held for ransom,” Vincent says.

What Vincent and his family didn’t realize at the time was that they were caught in the middle of a bizarre Inglewood mortuary rivalry that’s spanned the better part of 40 years.

The trouble began in the early 1960s, when Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary set up shop four blocks from a funeral parlor called Inglewood Mortuary, which had been around since 1952. Neither was formally associated with nearby Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Confusion naturally ensued. Families looking to bury their loved ones at Inglewood Park routinely mistook one mortuary for the other.

James Mitchell Blair knew none of this when he took out an insurance policy with Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary several decades ago – one whose benefits appreciated along with inflation, but could be used only at Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary. And so it didn’t dawn on him to update phone information for the mortuary in his will when the number changed several years ago.

When Blair passed away at his son Marshall’s home in Oxnard, his family was left with the old number. In the confusion that followed, they called the wrong mortuary to come pick up their father and bring him back to Inglewood.

“We had an idea something wasn’t right when the van arrived to take the body,” one family member told Vincent. “The gurney looked a little ratty.”

But the men in the van were pleasant, and when the Blair family showed them the contract, they were assured everything was in order.

“We’d never done this before,” says Vincent. “We assumed everything was taken care of.”

Later that day, the family received a call from a mortuary, asking for permission to embalm the body – which Marshall gave them, still under the impression that things were being done in accordance with his father’s will.

Following that same will, the family showed up at Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary the next day. But their father’s body wasn’t there.

It turned out that Inglewood Mortuary had done the embalming themselves, and was holding the body. The Blair family, angry and confused, made their way four blocks to retrieve their father.

Instead of an act of contrition, Inglewood Mortuary gave them the hard sell.

“They offered us discounts on a coffin and on funeral arrangements,” Vincent remembers. “But I wasn’t looking to bargain hunt. I wanted to carry out my father’s final wishes. If my father’s will had said, ‘Take me to Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary, unless you can find yourself a good deal somewhere else,’ I’d have done that. But it didn’t.”

The family demanded the release of their father’s body. The mortuary refused until they received payment for the work they’d done.

For the next several hours, Vincent Blair fought for his father’s corpse.

On a recent cool, sunny day, the perfectly manicured lawn of the Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary glistens with drops of recently receded winter rain. Peeking out at the back of the parking lot, the pristine grounds of the Inglewood Park Cemetery look especially verdant and peaceful. This is the final resting place of some of black America’s brightest lights: Ella Fitzgerald, “Sugar” Ray Robinson and Mayor Tom Bradley.

Inside the waiting room of the Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary funeral parlor, however, the mood is a little less serene. Two couples, casually dressed, waiting to make funeral arrangements, sit across from each other on floral couches, airing their various grievances with the death industry.

Apparently, eternal tranquility among the stars doesn’t come cheaply.

“They charge you $800 just to open and close the casket,” says a man in an all-jean outfit to the couple across the way. “And they won’t do it unless you pay upfront.”

“They get you when you come into this world, and they get you when you leave,” the other man, in corduroys, responds, shaking his head.

“Worse on the way out,” his wife agrees. “I’m going to save some money and pick the flowers myself.”

The couples laugh, but their talk soon takes a somber turn.

“We’ve had a really rough 30 days,” says the man in jeans. “These people get you when you’re at your lowest.”

Just as the conversation really starts to get heated, a tall, thin woman, conservatively dressed in an all-black suit, emerges from a back office and heads to greet me. Her name is Laquinta Howard and she’s the funeral director at Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary, the woman who eventually negotiated the release of James Mitchell Blair’s body. She escorts me outside, away from the griping couples, to explain the Blairs’ situation.

“It’s illegal to hold a body against the wishes of the family,” she explains. “You have to release it when asked.”

Howard got Inglewood Mortuary to release the body to her care, and days later James Mitchell Blair was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery as his will intended.

The Blair family ordeal wasn’t the first time she’s had to argue with Inglewood Cemetery on behalf of a family.

“On average I’d say this happens about three times a month,” she says. “The Blair family was actually the second in a week where we’d had an incident like that. Some families, like the Blairs, know to raise questions. But others feel like they have to pay.”

Howard says body mix-ups between the two rival mortuaries have been happening for as long as Howard has been here – 11 years. From what she’s been told, it happened before then too.

“But things weren’t always like they are now,” she says.

Back when Howard first started working at the mortuary, there was a more collegial attitude between rivals. If one accidentally picked up a body that was contracted to the other, they would drop it off as a courtesy.

Around five years ago, though, things changed.

“All of a sudden they stopped delivering the bodies to us and started charging people these fees.”

And customers started complaining.

“I’d estimate that around 15 percent of our pre-paid business gets caught up over at Inglewood Mortuary. So people wind up paying twice.”

Howard says she’s tried any number of times to clear up the situation. Last year she called decedent services at Kaiser Fontana, a hospital that’s one of the mortuary’s largest sources of business, to make sure the company had the right number. They didn’t. Kaiser Fontana had the two mortuaries reversed in their phone records.

And Kaiser wasn’t alone.

“We’re the third-largest mortuary in the L.A. area,” says Howard. “We’ve got people coming in from all over the place. But I can’t call everybody.”

In the past year, Howard says she and Inglewood Mortuary came to an agreement that when a client calls, the mortuary will clarify that the person has the proper address.

But mistakes still happen.

“Sometimes Inglewood Mortuary tries to bargain with people, even if they have a contract over here with us,” she alleges. “We tell people to file a complaint with the California Department of Consumer Affairs if they’ve had a problem. But this is our competitor. It’s not like we can tell them to do anything they don’t want to do.”

Just four blocks away, John Carlson, owner of Inglewood Mortuary, tells a different story. He remembers the Blairs well: “Yeah, we did their embalming for them and they didn’t want to pay.”

Carlson says the Blair family knew full well who his company was when they called to pick up James Mitchell  Blair last November.

“Mr. Blair died very early in the morning. His family called and got no response at the other mortuary. We’re a family-run business. We pick up at five in the morning. They wanted their father out of the house and told us to come get him.”

Carlson admits that while the policy used to be to drop the body off at the correct mortuary if there was a mix-up, Inglewood Mortuary stopped doing that years ago – specifically for cases like the Blairs.

“We drove all the way up to Oxnard. With the price of gas these days, we’re not going to make that trip without being compensated.”

Carlson says he understands how the situation with the two mortuaries can be confusing, especially with regards to pre-paid contracts. But he says the fault lies with Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary.

“They didn’t do the work on Mr. Blair. They could refund the money to the family if they wanted to be fair. But they don’t.”

Carlson is correct about his rival’s policy. Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary gives pre-paid clients a 25 percent discount when mistakes happen, but doesn’t give a complete refund.

The real reason this is an issue “is because Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary makes themselves the beneficiaries of the insurance policy and not the decedent,” Carlson asserts. “With us it’s not like that. The money is given to the family, so that if the person happens to pass in Florida, they can use the money there. Or, if there’s a mistake, you can use the money at Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary. Our competitors won’t let you do that.”

Carlson denies using the Blairs’ dead father as a negotiating tool. “We’re not allowed to hold a body, and we did release it,” he explains. “But again, we’re a small, family-run business. We need to get paid for the work that we do.”

Carlson says this type of thing happens frequently and happens both ways – Inglewood Cemetery Mortuary takes their share of his business too.

Given the hassles of the past, and the resentments they have built, is there any way to clear up the confusion to prevent situations like this in the future?

“Yeah,” says Carlson, “the other place can change their name.”

Despite the morbid chaos of the past 40 years, not a single complaint about either mortuary has ever been filed with the California Department of Consumer Affairs.

“This is the first I’ve heard of this situation,” says CDCA spokesman Russ Heimerich. “If someone comes forward and complains we’ll certainly look into it.”

Likewise, Los Angeles County District Attorney spokesperson Sandi Gibbons has never heard of such a case.

“We had some cemeteries that were digging up and dumping bodies a few years ago to make space, but that’s the only thing I’ve heard in at least five years.”

For now it appears the authorities won’t be looking into either mortuary anytime soon. The Blair family has decided to forgo a legal fight and cut their losses after Inglewood Mortuary recently offered them a deep discount. The family’s decision to pay seems to indicate that the truth lies somewhere between John Carlson’s take and their own.

But the whole incident still leaves an acrid taste in Vincent Blair’s mouth.

He admits his family may have made some mistakes in dealing with the situation with Inglewood Mortuary. But when you lose your father, things are confusing. Negotiating contracts and trying to figure out if you’re being duped isn’t exactly easy in grief.

“They really do get you at your most vulnerable,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Sorry about your father, but when can you pay?’

“When it comes to dealing with death, you don’t know what you don’t know.”