A Chicago funeral home has admitted it made a “mistake” after a suburban woman claimed her dead mother’s remains may have been buried by the wrong family.

The daughter of Ella Mae Rutledge told the Chicago Tribune she went to Leak and Sons Funeral Home on Chicago’s South Side Friday for a last-minute inspection of her 74-year-old mother’s body but quickly realized the person they showed her had different hair and the complexion and nails seemed off.

Spencer Leak, owner of Leak and Sons Funeral Home, said an employee mixed up the nametags on two of the bodies in the funeral home. He added that the daughter of another woman identified Rutledge’s body as her mother.

“Another family identified [Rutledge] as their loved one and later recanted and that’s when we found out what the mistake was,” Leak said.

Rutledge’s body was exhumed and Leak said the home is waiting for her family to come and identify her.

“The mistake has been corrected so we are waiting for [the family] to come and identify their mom and set a time for a burial,” Leak said.

The family of the other woman involved in the mix-up has also re-identified their mother and she was buried shortly after, the funeral home said.

Leak noted that incidents like this are possible in a funeral home, but the circumstances surrounding this mistake were unusual.

“Sometimes these things happen when there’s nametags or whatever but we’ve never had anything like this to happen where a person mistakenly identified someone as their loved one and then we find later that it wasn’t,” he said. “So therefore we have to correct the mistakes that our people made as well as the daughter of the other person who was involved.”



Rutledge’s family reportedly said the mix-up was “absolutely devastating.” Because they were unable to identify her body before her Saturday funeral, the family instead held a memorial service with roughly 300 people over the weekend.

“My heart goes out to the family,” Leak said. “We’ve asked them for forgiveness and we’ve said to them that we want to reconcile.”