A beleaguered funeral home may finally have its license yanked, just as a troubling new lawsuit soils its reputation even further.
The now infamous Bronx-based R.G. Ortiz Funeral Homes is facing “fines and potential license revocation” following the “result of the findings” of a state Department of Health investigation, a spokesperson told The Post Monday.
The spokesperson said the health department, which regulates licensure of funeral home directors in New York through its Bureau of Funeral Directing, could not comment specifically on the probe or the charges.
Meanwhile, Ortiz is being sued yet again, this time for allegedly failing to properly care for the corpse of a beloved father — whose body arrived decomposing for a second funeral service in the Dominican Republic.
His family was so horrified to find their father in such an advanced rate of rot that they decided to forego the second viewing and move straight to a burial, the lawsuit claims.
The body sat for nearly eight days inside the Bronx funeral home’s viewing room, according to an attorney representing the devastated family.
“Eight days in the viewing room — unrefrigerated and unembalmed,” said lawyer Phil Rizzuto, who told The Post he has close to 10 open suits against Ortiz. “I can’t imagine how. The body must have smelled, no?”
A lawyer representing the troubled funeral home in numerous lawsuits did not reply to a request for comment.
The latest suit, filed last in Bronx Supreme Court last week, comes less than a month after another family accused the funeral home of sending the body of their beloved grandmother to the wrong country and allowing her remains to also decompose, horrifying the woman’s survivors.
Even before patriarch Antonio Cerda Garcia died earlier this year on March 25, his family made arrangements with Ortiz for him to be buried in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, the suit states.
Garcia’s body was sent to the funeral home the day he died, and assumed responsibility for his body’s preparation and the “proper and sanitary transportation” to the Dominican Republic, according to the lawsuit.
But after days of waiting, his body finally arrived on April 8 “in decomposing, unpreserved condition,” the family’s lawsuit reads, forcing the family to cancel the funeral service and proceed with only a burial.
“It’s just bizarre that they don’t care about their clients,” said Rizzuto.
A funeral home chain with locations in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn, Ortiz has long been in hot water over accusations of their disdain for the dead — with claims of desecration dating back as far as 2017.
Last summer, the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection scored a settlement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for customers over alleged predatory and deceptive practices.
Agency spokesperson Michael Lanza said that New Yorkers harmed by Ortiz can make a claim for restitution by calling 311, or visiting their website.
The state Attorney General’s Office did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
