Vel McKee has watched the surveillance film from the Texas funeral home — footage showing something that made her “sick,” she told the Odessa American.
“We just never dreamed that something like this would happen,” McKee told the newpaper. “Not in a million years.”
The video shows the body of McKee’s mother, Lois Hicks, lying in a casket in an empty room at Sunset Memorial Gardens & Funeral Home. Then, a woman is seen entering the room, approaching the casket and leaning over Hicks’s body.
McKee told the Odessa American that the woman then pulled a ring off Hicks’s finger before walking out of the room on Friday.
The Odessa Police Department posted video of the incident on its Facebook page Monday. A day later, police said they had arrested 41-year-old Kalynn Homfeld and charged her with theft from a human corpse.
Police Cpl. Steve LeSueur told USA Today that the ring was worth about $10.
The Odessa American reported that the ring had been put on Hicks’s hand “to symbolize her love and devotion to her husband, Gayle, who died three years ago.”
Lois Hicks died last week at age 88, according to the Odessa American. Before the theft, McKee told the newspaper, she and her sister had brushed Hicks’s hair and applied makeup to her face.
“I can’t believe someone would be that low,” McKee said, referring to the theft.
Holly Herford, Hicks’s great-granddaughter, told the newspaper that family members were “angry, hurt, devastated and disgusted that someone would do something like this.”
According to the Odessa American, Homfeld “has a criminal history of arrests on theft charges.” Citing court documents, the newspaper reported that Homfeld “made voluntary statements against her own penal interest and specifically apologized to the family” during polie questioning. LeSueur, the Odessa police spokesman, said the ring was not recovered.
“We hope she realizes that she did something terrible,” Brenda Vaughan, another of Hicks’s daughters, told the Odessa American. “She needs a lot of prayers.”