The service in the Chula Vista mortuary chapel was soon to start, and Celina Gonzalez was ready to see her husband’s body. She’d not seen the long-haul trucker since he’d died in Texas a month earlier, the victim of a blood clot. It was April 2020, the mystery of COVID was new and restrictions were tight. As guests were about to arrive, she had her first chance to see him. The grieving widow finally looked into the casket.
It was not him.
Through a Spanish-language interpreter, Gonzalez would later tell a San Diego jury that a funeral home official tried to explain that yes, it was her husband. But Gonzalez was certain. Her husband had tattoos. This man did not.
His body had been mixed up with another man’s body in Texas. Jose Gonzalez Jr.’s body had instead been sent to a medical school, donated to science. His body sat there for three weeks and was then cremated — a fate Celina Gonzalez told the jury was expressly against her husband’s wishes. He had feared cremation.
She sued the local funeral home, Community Mortuary, and an official there, alleging negligence and breach of contract. In 2024, a San Diego Superior Court jury found in favor of the mortuary and its official.
But the case is not over. Last week, the 4th District Court of Appeals, Division 1, reversed the verdict, citing a legal matter it said the trial judge had incorrectly decided before trial.
At trial, the jury found that while the mortuary had breached its contract by not producing the correct body, it would have been impossible for the mortuary to uphold the contract because the body had been cremated. That question of an impossibility defense, the appellate court said, was one that should have been decided by a judge, not a jury. The case is now headed back to the lower court.
An attorney representing Community Mortuary declined to comment, citing the active litigation. The widow’s attorney, Dave Sullivan, said he was pleased with the appellate decision regarding the argument over the impossibility defense.
Jose Gonzalez Jr., 47, died March 20, 2020, at a hospital in Fort Worth. The following day, a man by the name of Jesse Gonzales — same last name, different spelling — also died in Fort Worth. Both bodies were taken to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The appellate opinion, published April 8, suggests it’s possible a staffer there mixed up identification tags, inadvertently attaching them to the wrong body bags.
Jesse’s family had authorized donating his body to science. But on March 23, it was Jose’s body that was taken to the medical school. That same day, Jose’s wife sat in Community Mortuary in Chula Vista, discussing arrangements to bring her husband’s remains home.
A few days later, the Medical Examiner’s Office released Jesse’s body — thinking it was Jose’s body — to a transport company working for a Texas funeral home hired by the Chula Vista mortuary, according to the opinion. At the funeral home in Texas, Jesse’s body was embalmed, his body bag bearing the official tag from the Medical Examiner’s Office was incinerated, and the mortuary placed a new name tag on Jesse’s ankle.
On March 27, Jesse’s body, with Jose’s name on it, was delivered to Community Mortuary in Chula Vista. It was refrigerated until the open casket service.
On April 23, with guests about to arrive, Celina Gonzalez got her first look at the body in the casket. She would later learn that her husband’s body had been cremated in Texas six days earlier.
Sullivan, her attorney, contends that Community Mortuary had the three-week stretch before Jose was cremated in which it could have caught the mistake. Sullivan says the lack of the official tag from the Medical Examiner’s Office should have been a red flag that prompted a further check by Community to ensure it had the correct body.
“This whole thing, even though it started in Texas, was all avoidable if these guys had done what they were supposed to have done when the body arrived, which was to confirm that they have the right body,” Sullivan said.
At trial, the widow said she had tried unsuccessfully to see her husband’s body before the service and had supplied photos of him. That assertion is in dispute, according to the opinion.
“She still blames herself and beats herself up for not knocking down the door of the mortuary when her husband arrived to make sure that it was the right body,” Sullivan said.
The appeals court also noted there was testimony that the body bag containing Jose’s body was labeled as a suspected COVID-19 case, and in the early days of the pandemic, the practice of opening a bag to check the ankle tag as an extra precaution against misidentification had been suspended.
Other members of Jose Gonzalez’s family also sued, but the appeals court found that only the widow had standing to bring a breach of contract action against the Chula Vista funeral home that she had hired.
Aside from the local suit, Celina Gonzalez filed suit in Texas against the Texas businesses that briefly had custody of her husband’s body, and those suits ended in confidential settlements. She also sued the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office, but the governmental entity was found to have immunity and was dismissed from the case.
Jesse Gonzales’ body was returned to Texas, and Jose Gonzalez’s remains were sent to California. Two years after her husband died, Celina Gonzalez had his remains interred in a San Diego cemetery.
