Cruise ship passenger kept in water cooler on Caribbean cruise

Robert Jones, a cruise ship passenger died aboard a ship while cruising the Caribbean.

His widow from Florida is now suing the cruise line saying that they mishandled his dead body by storing it in a water cooler.

He was supposed to be kept in a properly chilled morgue but instead, his wife found that he had been put in a walk-in cooler for a week.

The way the body was stored meant that it decomposed quickly and was bloated and green by the time the family got to shore.

This meant that they had to forgo the family tradition of having an open coffin at his funeral.

The boat, the Celebrity Equinox is able to carry 3,000 passengers and cruises the Caribbean leaving from Fort Lauderdale in Florida.

In the lawsuit, Mrs Jones said the crew gave her two choices. They said she could either be dropped off with her deceased husband in Puerto Rico, which was the next stop. From there she would have to arrange transportation back to Florida.

Her other choice was to leave her husband stored for six days in the morgue until the ship returned to Fort Lauderdale.

Mrs Jones chose the morgue, but when funeral home employees boarded the ship to collect Mr Jones’ body, they found the morgue was shut. Instead, they found him in a bag on a palette in the water cooler.

The water cooler was a lot warmer than a morgue would be and this led to Mr Jones’s fast decomposition.

The cruise line is being sued for $1m in damages.