In August of 2020, 20-year-old Timesha Beauchamp was still breathing while a Michigan funeral home was preparing to embalm her body. 5 years later, the mother of Beauchamp, Erica Lattimore, decided to speak out about this traumatic accident.
Beauchamp, who had cerebral palsy, was declared dead in her Southfield, Michigan home by an emergency room doctor, over the phone. Beauchamp was delivered to the funeral home in a body bag. When the embalmer noticed she was breathing and had her eyes open the embalming process was cancelled.
The family has been denied their day in court because of government delays of the trial. Lattimore states she is “not giving up” and will take legal action against the EMS workers. Lattimore’s attorneys, Jennifer Damico and Steven Hurbis, made a public statement that Beauchamp’s breathing was “severely restricted” in transportation to the funeral home. They claim this led to Beauchamp’s death 2 months later. Lattimore said, “I will go through the long haul, however long it takes. She lived for 20 years. If it takes 20 more years for this to get heard in court and God gives me the breath, I’m there.”
This type of accident has occurred a few times before, most recently in 2024, 82-year-old Constance Glantz was declared dead by a hospice facility. Funeral home employees discovered she was breathing and performed CPR. In 2018 Walter Williams was pronounced dead. He was later found kicking inside a body bag in an embalming room just before the procedure was to begin. In 2018 a Russian woman was accidentally injected with formalin instead of saline, which led to organ failure and her death two weeks later.
