Funeral Goes Wrong When Thief Steals Hearse, Body

It's tough to hold a funeral when someone's driven off with the body. That's apparently what happened at a recent memorial in Australia, Gawker reports. Shortly before the event, a funeral home worker was getting the hearse ready when "this guy jumped out of the bushes, jumped straight into the hearse and started it up," the sister-in-law of deceased human rights lawyer Seth Richardson tells the Sydney Morning Herald. "The funeral guy was banging on the window going, 'What the hell are you doing? You can't drive away in the hearse.'"

Richardson's brother called police, and from there, things got even weirder. The brother reportedly said a car had been stolen "with my dead brother in the back," and the police took that to mean there had been a murder. The brother drove after the hearse and managed to catch the driver in a cul-de-sac. Police soon arrived and arrested the guy, who they say is a dementia patient who'd been missing from his nursing home; authorities say he was hospitalized for assessment after the incident, the Telegraph reports. After all that, the funeral still started on time, the Morning Herald reports. The good news: "Seth would have thought this was so funny," his sister-in-law says. "He had a wicked sense of humor." (More funeral stories.)