14 DAY TRIAL // Two funeral home employees in Florida were dismissed after it was revealed that, last week, they drove a veteran's lifeless body to a local Dunkin' Donuts.
The two men were in the mood for coffee and didn't think the deceased Lt. Col. Jesse Coleman, whom they were supposed to drive from Veterans Funeral Care in Clearwater to his service in Lecanto, would mind the detour.
Unfortunately for them, one of the other patrons of the Dunkin' Donuts coffeehouse they visited on the morning of May 7 happened to see the hearse.
Outraged, Rob Carpenter used his phone to snap a photo of Lt. Col. Jesse Coleman sitting in the back of the hearse parked close to the Dunkin' Donuts coffeehouse and shared it with Facebook group Veteran Warriors.
The photo went viral and so the hearse driver and the funeral director's boss learned about their too heated affair with coffee and fired them.
Honoring vets comes first, says Jim Rudolph of Veterans Funeral Care
In an interview with the press, Veterans Funeral Care President Jim Rudolph explained that the reason the two men were fired was that they failed to follow protocol and honor Lt. Col. Jesse Coleman.
“What could they have been thinking? It’s not what we do. That’s absolutely a total lack of respect. When a car is heading to a service, if there's more than two people it doesn't pull over,” he said, as cited by Orlando Weekly.
Protocol dictates that, for veteran funerals, hearses are not supposed to make any stops on the way from the funeral home to where the service is held. If there is a pressing need to stop, a person must remain with the hearse at all times.
Otherwise put, the hearse driver and the funeral director who were fired did wrong both when they stopped to get a cup of coffee and when they went inside the Dunkin' Donuts coffeehouse together, leaving the hearse unattended in the parking lot.
