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‘WHERE’S MOM?’ FUNERAL HOME ‘LOSES’ L.I. WOMAN’S BODY

A distraught Long Island family is taking legal action against a Florida cemetery after they discovered another woman’s body inside their mother’s casket just minutes before her funeral – wearing the burial garb they had picked out for her.

Brothers Alan and Robert Alcabes made arrangements to bury their mother, Anne, 86, alongside her dead husband, Bernard, in Fort Lauderdale after her death in December.

But when the brothers were asked to identify their mom just before a graveside service at Menorah Gardens cemetery Dec. 6, they were stunned to see a strange woman in her simple wooden casket, wearing her burial shroud.

Immediately, “my brother and I started to get a really bad feeling because it didn’t look anything like our mother,” said Alan Alcabes, 61, a Mercedes-Benz salesman from Roslyn.

He had seen his mother just two weeks earlier, before she died of an aortal aneurysm.

“We can’t OK this – it doesn’t look like Mom,” said a shaken Robert Alcabes, 58, of Melville. Alan called in a funeral-home worker and told her it was not the right body.

“No, that’s impossible,” the woman told them. When they insisted, she opened the bottom of the casket “and lifted the poor woman’s legs. She found a toe tag, and there was someone else’s name,” said Alan Alcabes.

“Where’s our mother?” both brothers demanded.

“We were just in total shock,” said Alan Alcabes. “They put the woman in the shroud and in the coffin we had picked out.”

The funeral worker rushed off to try to locate the correct body, and the brothers told a group of sobbing relatives and friends the incredible news.

Eventually, they were told that their mother’s remains had been switched with those of a woman who had requested embalming and interment in a mausoleum at a different cemetery.

Because of the mix-up, their mother’s body had been embalmed, in violation of Jewish tradition.

The Alcabes family waited hours for their mother’s body to be brought to the correct cemetery, as well as for a new casket and shroud, which had to be driven to the cemetery from the funeral home, an hour away.

“We felt violated,” said Alcabes. “It’s frightening. How do you lose a body? It shows a lack of respect for the dead and takes all the dignity from the service.”

He said he and his brother later decided to file suit against Service Corp. International “because they have a careless, negative attitude.”

Some 1,400 other families are also suing the Menorah Gardens cemeteries in Palm Beach and Broward counties, alleging burial problems and grave desecrations.

One widow said her husband’s tongue was cut out in violation of Jewish law.

SCI spokesman Don Mathis said the Alcabes’ mix-up “was clearly a very unfortunate event. Somebody mixed up, working on two different things at once.”

“There’s no excuse for it but it was rectified immediately,” Mathis said.