BOSTON -- A Boston funeral home will pay $325,000 to a couple who said it lost the remains of their stillborn son, forcing them to have to sift through cremated ashes looking for them.

Funeral Home Settles After Baby's Body Lost

Robert and Therese Bellissimo Benedict were testified in a civil lawsuit against J.S. Waterman & Sons in Suffolk Superior Court Monday, the Boston Globe reported.

The funeral home's lawyer acknowledged that it lost the remains of the son, Lourdes Benedict, in 2003, but denied that Waterman & Sons is responsible for any emotional damage they may have suffered, the paper said.

"What is being sacrificed is compassion for the bereaved families, dignity for the deceased," said Therese Bellissimo Benedict said after the ruling.

The attorney said the funeral home had nothing to do with the couple's loss of a late-term pregnancy.

Therese Benedict delivered twins at Brigham & Women's hospital in April 2003 after learning that Lourdes heart had stopped beating. The other twin was born healthy and is now 4 years old.

The Benedicts said they put Lourdes body in the care of the funeral home until a mausoleum was built.

"We had purchased a casket. We brought personal belongings, a blanket, a pin, family pictures. So my vision during this times was that his body had been preserved, that he was in a casket, that he was swaddled and the belongings were close to home and he had his own place," Therese Bellissimo Benedict said after the ruling.

But the family said what really happened to their son's body was very disturbing.

"We learned that instead of preserving Lourdes' body, they put him in a Ziploc bag in a refrigerator. They then put him on a table in the refrigerator. Sometimes all the tables were occupied by bodies in body bags. The body bags covered the tables, so they put the body underneath or maybe someplace else. The personal belongings that they took for him were found on the floor," said attorney Gordon Walker.

A few months later the infant's body was placed in the coffin of a woman who was scheduled to be cremated, according to court records, and it could not be located.

The family ended up searching several coffins and sifting through the woman's ashes, some of which were tested to try to identify the baby's DNA. They said they still aren't sure what happened to the child's remains although some ashes did show male DNA.