'Frozen' star's parents sue Boynton Beach cemetery for burying stranger in family plot

WEST PALM BEACH — The parents of actor Josh Gad, who voiced the snowman Olaf in Disney’s animated film “Frozen," have accused a cemetery in suburban Boynton Beach of burying a stranger in their family's gravesite.

Susan Gad Schwartz and her husband, Stanton, are seeking more than $50,000 from Eternal Light Memorial Gardens, an all-Jewish cemetery where Schwartz's parents are buried. Cristina Pierson, their attorney, said the couple bought two gravesites adjacent to her parents' in 2011 with the intention of resting "side by side for eternity."

In a lawsuit filed this month, Schwartz accused the cemetery of having "double sold" her plot beside her husband's to someone else, whose remains are currently buried there. Pierson said the cemetery rejected the couples' request to have the stranger moved elsewhere, prompting the family to take legal action.

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The cemetery and its parent company, NorthStar Cemetery Services of Florida, have faced similar complaints before.

Eternal Light Memorial Garden settled a lawsuit for an undisclosed amount in 2019 after a woman said the cemetery buried her husband yards away from the plots they purchased alongside their close friends. She said the mix-up was due to the fact that Eternal Light sold the same plot to two people.

In 2012, a different woman filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of herself and others who claimed that NorthStar had a "pervasive and continuing practice" of burying people in the wrong gravesites and selling more plots without sufficient space to do so.

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In the lawsuit, which a federal judge dismissed on a technicality, the woman said the company routinely defiled its gravesites in order to make room for more bodies. She claimed that the cemetery hid those defilements to deceive its customers, a complaint echoed in Schwartz and her husband's lawsuit.

Schwartz said that during a visit to the cemetery, she and her husband approached cemetery staff with concerns about the area surrounding their plots. According to the lawsuit, a representative assured them that their spaces had not been impacted, pointing to a site map that the couple's lawyer, Pierson, called "very confusing."

The husband and wife, who are in their late 70s, took the representative's word for it.

Lawyer says cemetery employee 'blurted out' plot had been sold twice

Later, Pierson said a woman visited the cemetery and mentioned to a member of the office staff that her friends — the Schwartzes — owned two plots. According to the lawyer, an Eternal Light employee "blurted out" that one of those plots had accidentally been sold twice.

The friend told the couple, who returned to Eternal Light and demanded that the "unauthorized remains" be moved. Pierson said the cemetery refused. When asked for confirmation, a spokesperson for Eternal Light declined to comment.

"We feel strongly that all client information remains confidential and, accordingly, we are not in a position to discuss any family’s concerns," said Claire Piché, a NorthStar managing partner. "With respect to this matter, we continue our efforts to resolve this matter amicably and resolve the family’s concerns."

Pierson said that none of the cemetery's proposed solutions would allow Schwartz to rest beside her husband and her parents, Holocaust survivors Evelyn and Joseph Greenblatt. Under their terms, she must choose one or the other — a sacrifice she says she isn't willing to make.

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: 'Frozen' star's parents sue cemetery for burying stranger in plot