It was a horrific task, but Robert and Therese Bellissimo Benedict were determined to recover the remains of their stillborn son. They sifted by hand through the ashes of a cremated woman on a plastic-wrapped table in the basement of a Boston funeral home.
"It was grim," Robert Benedict said yesterday, recalling the day in 2003 after the remains of their son, Lourdes Benedict, vanished. "Our resolve was that we needed to do everything we could to try and find Lourdes."
Benedict was the leadoff witness in the couple's civil lawsuit against the Boston funeral home of J.S. Waterman & Sons, whose lawyer acknowledged in Suffolk Superior Court yesterday that the facility lost Lourdes Benedict's remains in July 2003.
But the lawyer, Joseph J. Leghorn, said the funeral home was not responsible for any emotional damage the couple may have suffered, contending that the pain began when the couple learned at a Boston hospital that one of their twin boys was stillborn that April.
"As people we can all sympathize with those parents who lose a late-term pregnancy," Leghorn said in his opening statement to the jury. "But Waterman did not have anything to do with the loss of the late-term pregnancy."
During his testimony, Benedict occasionally wiped away tears with a tissue, especially as he described learning in the hospital that Lourdes was dead and later learning that Waterman had lost the remains.
"This just can't be happening to us," Benedict recalled thinking. "Losing him - and then losing him. It was really too much."
Therese Benedict was seven months pregnant when she was rushed in April 2003 to Brigham and Women's Hospital, where doctors learned that Lourdes's heart was no longer beating. On April 7, she delivered the stillborn Lourdes along with his twin, Cole, who is now a healthy 4-year-old.
The Benedicts hired Waterman to care for the stillborn boy's body while they spent days watching over the prematurely born Cole in the hospital.
Days stretched into weeks. Robert Benedict said the couple decided not to bury or cremate Lourdes but to lay him to rest in a mausoleum in an Everett cemetery.
While waiting for the mausoleum to be built, Robert Benedict testified, he dropped off a crocheted blanket, a crucifix, a photograph of Cole and his parents, stuffed animals, and a cross made from palms at Waterman. He said he was assured the items would be kept with his son's body.
He said he saw the body once, looking like a "little papoose" swaddled in a hospital blanket. The remains were kept in the funeral home's refrigerated morgue and in a plastic bag, according to testimony.
But sometime in the last week of July, Lourdes's remains apparently were placed inside a coffin with the body of a woman who was being cremated, according to testimony and court records.
Officials of Waterman informed the couple on July 28, 2003, that the funeral home could not find the infant's remains. The Benedicts told them to keep looking.
The search, according to company officials who testified yesterday, included checking an elevator shaft, a medical waste disposal system, a dumpster near a fraternity house, and coffins in the funeral home already occupied by corpses.
The child's body was not found, leading the family to insist on conducting DNA testing on the ashes of the cremated woman. The funeral home persuaded the woman's family to provide the ashes to the Benedicts, who twice searched the ashes.
Benedict said he and his wife still do not know what happened to their son, but he acknowledged to the defense lawyer that testing showed male DNA mingled with the woman's ashes.
Under cross-examination by Leghorn, Benedict testified that neither he nor his wife has received mental health counseling since they lost Lourdes.
Benedict also said that he dotes on Cole, has a wonderful relationship with his two adult children from a former marriage, has taken up painting, and has a strong relationship with his wife.
The trial, before Judge Paul K. Troy, resumes today.
