A grieving mother has revealed the harrowing moment she walked into a funeral director’s living room and found her dead son sitting in a baby bouncer ‘watching cartoons’.
Zoe Ward’s newborn son Bleu was just three weeks old when he died of brain damage at Leeds General Infirmary in 2021.
The 32-year-old asked Florrie’s Army – set up by Amie Upton after her own daughter was stillborn in 2017 – to arrange his funeral after a recommendation from a family friend.
She said the service sounded ‘brilliant’ when she first spoke to Ms Upton, with Florrie’s Army offering free handprints, photographs, baby clothing and a dedicated funeral service to bereaved parents.
But what followed rocked Ms Ward to the core and left her ‘screaming’ in horror.
She was led to believe Bleu’s body had been picked up from the hospital by someone on behalf of Florrie’s Army and it was her understanding that his body would be kept in a ‘professional setting’.
However, when she went round to visit the next day, she was ‘terrified’ to see Ms Upton ‘watching cartoons’ with Bleu’s body next to her in a baby bouncer in the living room – with a second dead infant on the sofa.
Ms Upton
She told BBC News: ‘I realised it were Bleu and she [Ms Upton] says: “Come in, we’re watching PJ Masks.”
‘There’s a cat scratcher in the corner and I can hear a dog barking and there was another [dead] baby on the sofa. It wasn’t a nice sight.
‘I rang my mum and I’m saying, “This ain’t right’… I was screaming down the phone [saying]: “It’s mucky, it’s dirty, he can’t stay here”.’
Ms Ward immediately arranged for Bleu’s body to be removed from Ms Upton’s care, arranging for another funeral director to intervene.
She said she was left ‘upset and angry’ that her son was being kept in the house like that.
Bleu before he passed away
The Daily Mail has contacted Ms Upton, 38, for comment. Her response to the BBC was that she had only had two complaints in the eight years since she set up Florrie’s Army in Harehills, Leeds.
Shockingly, the funeral industry is unregulated in England and Wales, meaning there is no legal requirement about how bodies are stored. Funeral directors do not need a qualification to set up a business either.
Ms Upton, according to her Facebook, set up Florrie’s Army after her own daughter – Florrie – was stillborn at 29 weeks in 2017. She lost her unborn baby after her abusive partner repeatedly rammed a child’s buggy into her, causing her tummy to crash into the corner of an open freezer door.
